Words of Faith Francois Mauriac
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Transcript of Words of Faith Francois Mauriac
.
FAITH
WORDS OF FAITH
by FRANCOIS MAURIAC
translated by
REV. EDWARD H. FLANNERY
Words of Faith contains a collec-
tion of six discourses delivered bythe famous French novelist and
journalist in Paris, Brussels, Ma-
drid, Geneva, and in Stockholm on
the occasion of his reception of the
Nobel prize for literature. They re-
veal Mr. Mauriac in a new dimen-
sion of candor and moral passion;
and for his devotees they provide a
fresh and intimate glimpse at the
man behind the writer.
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Words of Faith
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Words of Faith
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WORDS OF FAITH
Nihil Obstat
Rt Rev. Thomas V. Cassidy
Censor Librorum
Imprimaturi^Russell J. McVinney, D.D.
Bishop of Providence
July 30, 1955
WORDS OF FAITHby
FRANgOIS MAURIAC
PHILOSOPHICAL LIBRARYNEW YORK
Copyright 1955 by Philosophical Library, Inc.
15 East 40th Street, New York 16, N. Y.
All rights reserved.
Translated from the original
French Paroles Catholiques by
REV. EDWARD H. FLANNERY
Printed in the United States of America
by The Haddon Craftsmen, Inc.
Table of Contents
I Spoken in Spain*
II What Can Christians Hope for on Earth? 40
III Is Christian Civilization in Peril? 53
IV An Author and His Work 7
V Anguish 79
VI The Living God 102
WORDS OF FAITH
Spoken in Spain*
ONE of our greatest poets, Charles Baudelaire, once
complained that in France everyone resembles
Voltaire. It was a good jest and not, indeed, with-
out its grain of truth. The flair for what is reasonable
and clear, a loathing for the irrational, a distrust of
whatever is not verifiable by reason: here is the pith
of the Voltairean spirit and, to a certain degree, of
the French spirit as well.
I say "to a certain degree" because the France of
Rabelais, Montaigne, and Moliere, the France of
Voltaire and the Encyclopedists has always found
itself pitted against the Christian France of Bossuet
and Pascal.
What is the present state of this perennial debate,
which with varying fortunes has gone on from gen-
eration to generation? How does it look to a French-
man of today? I dare not tell you that this vast
* Text of a discourse delivered in Madrid in 1929.
1
WORDS OF FAITH
question is going to be our subject this evening; justto pose it properly would alone take more than an
hour.
My goal is much more modest. I wish simply to
cast a glance about that corner o the great field of
battle which destiny has made my home and to de-
scribe for you what I see there. "Field of battle/' did
I say? My words do violence to my thought. For in
the literary climate disagreements of an intellectual
or religious nature are far less likely to incite the
hostility they would, for example, in politics. Asoften as not, our adversary turns out to be an in-
structor who enjoys our admiration as well as our
respect, or a friend to whom we are tied by bonds of
genuine affection. So I am confident that it will be
an easy matter for me to keep this debate, whichotherwise could be so fierce, above controversy andon a lofty and serene plane. As a matter of fact, in
this debate your countryman, and my friend, RamonFernandez, has displayed so much wisdom and re-
straint that I shall be forced to reply less to what he
actually said than to what he merely implied.But first I must apologize for asking you to medi-
tate for an hour with me, when perhaps all youwished to do here was to relax. You are the victims, I
am afraid, of a particular idea that I have always had
2
SPOKEN IN SPAIN
of Spain and of the Spanish. I began by citing the
remark of one of our poets: "In France, everyone re-
sembles Voltaire." Well, I have never been able to
think of Spain without seeing the face of Theresa of
Avila or the countenance of Saint John of the Cross.
Despite the thousand and one features that Spaincould exhibit to dazzle a Frenchman from Gascogny,it remains for me above all that spot on earth whereman touched God at closest range, where the em-
brace of the Creator and the creature was more inti-
mate than anywhere else in the world. The same
daring which lured so many of your heroes toward
uncharted seas and the Indies urged them also up-ward toward the Infinite Spirit, which they em-
braced. And just as your navigators traced our maps,so your mystics received the grace to mark off the
paths which brought them to such heights. Amongall the victories of which Spain could boast, the one
which has always fascinated me is expressed in that
superb statement of Theresa of Avila: "I was not
quite twenty years old when I trod upon a van-
quished world."
Then again, a Frenchman born in Bordeaux, a
native of Landes, who spent his entire youth at your
very gates is familiar with the other faces of Spain.
The patois spoken around us in my youth was re-
3
WORDS OF FAITH
plete, enriched with words from Spanish. When a
storm was brewing, we would ask if it came from
Spain, just to know if it was going to be a bad one;
and I remember how we used to close our eyes and
dilate our nostrils upon feeling that Spanish wind onour little faces, a gust that at once enchanted our
senses but burned our skins. And at college in Bor-
deaux, we used always to be on pins and needles when
Vespers lagged for fear we might miss the first bull.
We would hurry along the dusty road those summer
Sundays keeping pace with the old Victorian phae-tons that approached the arenas, their embroideries
glistening in the sun Guerita and Reverie, Albeno
and Mazzantini.
But, in the end, it was by its heroism that this
Spain, which I found so charming, captivated me.
And if I have delighted in retracing on her roads the
footsteps of Don Quixote and on the high seas the
wake of Columbus' caravels, I have never felt that I
was tasting her genius at its best except in those of
her sons and daughters in whom heroism went be-
yond itself and was transformed into sanctity.
That is the reason why it occurred to me quite
naturally to speak to you on a subject so close to myheart. If one of my own countrymen could say that
in France everyone resembles Voltaire, how much
4
SPOKEN IN SPAIN
more striking must this resemblance be to Spanish
eyes! What probably impresses you in the France of
today and surely must have impressed you as
you listened to Ramon Fernandez the other eveningwas, whether you like them or not, the qualities of
good sense and reason, the taste for rational verifica-
tion, the mistrust of (not to say a hostility toward)whatever is not reducible to clear-cut formulas, of
whatever is not an object of experience: in short, a
hatred of the mysterious and a denial of the super-natural.
And yet a French spirituality does exist. After so
many dogged and violent assaults it has survived,
though to all appearances repressed, impoverished,and defeated. Repressed, yet gathering force in the
secret recesses of many souls; impoverished and
seemingly defeated, yet gaining strength from its veryweakness.
Of course, I cannot expect you to accept all this on
my say-so alone. From my books or from what you
may have heard about me, you know where mypreferences lie; and you are probably saying already
that I am preaching for my parish priest. You maysay that a Catholic, with all the good faith in the
world, tends to attach importance to questions which
no longer interest anyone but himself and his friends.
5
WORDS OF FAITH
However, I give you my word, I am at pains to putaside my own hopes and preferences. With all the ob-
jectivity I am capable of, I scan the ruins of French
Catholicism.
Following an assault of more than two centuries,
these ruins are vast; a mere glance is enough to con-
firm this. But what is also apparent is that the cause
of this disaster is not to be found within Catholic
doctrine itself but outside it, in historical and polit-
ical happenings. This should be apparent even to our
foes, if they are attentive to the facts and sincerely
disposed. The manifold abuses, the privileged status
of the Church in the ancien regime, to choose but
one example, are at the root of much of the anti-
clericalism in our provinces. Then at the turn of the
century, certain laws, already well ripened from long
preparation behind the scenes, were applied with
patience and tenacity. These laws systematically de-
stroyed almost every channel through which Chris-
tian metaphysics had reached our children, and
particularly the children of the people.The triumph of a certain theory of the all-powerful
laicized State is what dealt the rudest blow to Chris-
tianity in France. (This conception, to be truthful,
has never lacked its defenders in my country's his-
tory; we find them among the jurists of our MostChristian King as well as among the Jacobins of the
6
SPOKEN IN SPAIN
Convention.) Only the outer scaffolding, however,the organization and framework, was affected, notthe doctrine. The living water could be diverted
from those souls no longer partaking of it, but it wasnever itself to run dry or lose its purity. Christian
dogma, momentarily dimmed by Scientism, shines
forth today unimpaired. Just as Christ once passedin the midst of those who would stone him, only to
elude them, as St. John shows us, so does He escapethe thousand and one contradictory theories hurled
at Him by the higher criticism; and He lives amongus yet.
If Catholicism in France has suffered greatly from
the alienation of the masses and the indifference or
hostility of the State, perhaps it has reaped some ad-
vantages as well. First of all, in proportion as the
Christian tide recedes from institutions and customs,
it reaches new depths in souls. Yes, in my homeland
Christianity gains in intensity what it loses in exten-
sion. Those who believe have a more vibrant faith,
and those who love venture further in their love. It
may be that a triumphant God is less loved than a
forsaken one.
As the world returns to paganism, Christianity
seems to revert to its source. Not only are faith and
love renewed in faithful souls; but in the others the
WORDS OF FAITH
recoil from the Christian ideal leaves a void that
defies every effort to fill it. Among the vast throngsleft defenseless by the withdrawal of the Spirit, a
certain lack, a deficiency is evident: a gaping hollow,
a sense of infinite emptiness which smites the less
resourceful. One common trait that links all the
philosophical and literary extremes in vogue today
Surrealism, for instance is the fact that they are
mysticisms from which God is missing. It is these
mysticisms without God that are at the root of our
despair.
In an age of drugs and narcotics, I might add,
despair is all about us; not even the well-fed bour-
geoisie is spared. Every day the number of addicts to
intoxicants and soporifics continues to grow. True,
the group is still small. Never before, however, has
Christ's affirmation that He is the Life held greater
meaning. He is the life, literally even for the body.For those who, having lost Him, seek escape in
drunkenness and sleep, His absence is mortal.
To sleep is my one desire, to sleep rather than live . . .
In a slumber as sweet as death . . .
In these lines of Baudelaire we hear the troubled
sigh of the great army of addicts, the sigh of those
8
SPOKEN IN SPAIN
who in their self-made Paradise will not be consoled
for their loss of the true Paradise.
Many of the learned will smile, no doubt, togetherwith my friend Fernandez, and suspect that I amseeing things in their darkest hue to suit my purpose.
Many will assure me that they have not given them-selves to any kind of excess, that their heads are
solidly on their shoulders and their hearts firmly in
place, and that they feel no need of a belief in a Godto live reasonably or to strike a satisfactory balance of
their instincts and their higher aspirations. Theyglory in the name of humanist in the strongest sense
of the term. They are men, and nothing human is
alien to them; but, on the other hand, whatever ex-
ceeds the human is, to say the least, suspect. Theywant nothing founded on sentiment, and they do not
want sentiment encroaching on the realm of thought.Themselves alone they know with certitude; and in
themselves alone, not in some unverifiable super-
natural, do they intend to discover the elements of
their personality.
And still, there is something in these humanists,
these erudite adversaries of the Christian metaphysic,which impresses me. They no longer disregard the
succor that mankind has found, and continues to
find, in faith. Far, indeed, from treating religion with
9
WORDS OF FAITH
disdain, they are at pains to capture its secret. Yes,
assuredly, they admit of nothing in this wide world
but the human and they disallow all that surpasses
human experience; it is on the basis of self knowledgethat they would mould their personal life. Never-
theless, they give serious consideration to the whole
question of whether this sort of personal life will fill
the place of religious living, and whether they will
find within themselves the daily strength that the
believer finds in his religious life.
Frenchmen like these, therefore, do not quite re-
semble Voltaire. To tell the truth, they resemble
Voltaire a good deal less than they do Montaigne,whom Ramon Fernandez has hailed as his master.
Montaigne who in his Essays, makes of his life a lab-
oratory for watching himself live, and whose onlyconcern is to disfigure nothing within him; Mon-
taigne, to whom the Christian idea of interior prog-
ress, of seeking perfection, is odious, and who,
doting on himself, wills that he be just as he is. Here,in effect, is the real father of the humanists of today.
Yet, I repeat, equally hostile to Christian thoughtas Voltaire and his school, these humanists do not for
all that share Voltaire's disdain for Christianity. In-
stead of thinking, as he did, that a religion for the
people is needed, they are tempted rather to say
10
SPOKEN IN SPAIN
that it is a religion for the elite that is necessary. It
has not escaped their notice that Christianity has
resolved that which for them ever remains the diffi-
cult problem: to organize the interior life after the
pattern of an external and ever present model; to
use, discard, and select, in accord with it, whateverin each being has the makings of a living person.
Like Taine and the rationalists of fifty years ago,our present-day humanists, you may be sure, do not
admit that the Unknown Being can be proved or be-
come an object of certitude. Even though they
persist in thinking that believers create this Godwhom they adore wholly by projecting outward the
values they find within themselves, at least they are
no longer so assured of the collapse, either imminentor remote, of a religion which they observe attractingso many souls. Here again, tlaey are far from
Voltaire. For the Eighteenth Century philosophersand their heirs in the Twentieth were dominated bythe idea that Christianity was virtually finished, and
that the theological stage of mankind was over. Theywere convinced that in its forward march, the mod-
ern world was in the process of eliminating the
ancient metaphysics, whose disappearance would be
in direct ratio to the progress of science.
Our humanists of today are not so sure. This does
11
WORDS OF FAITH
not mean that they have ceased exploiting the diffi-
culties that historical science casts in the path of
religion. It is simply that more than a century after
the onset of the debate, the evidence seems conclu-
sive that on this terrain nothing decisive will be
unearthed against the Christ of History. The devel-
opment and progress of the science of Exegesis con-
stantly calls into question matters which had been
deemed definitely settled. At present, independentcriticism dealing with the historicity of the NewTestament comes closer every day to what the Churchhas always taught. Catholic exegetes like Father de
Grandmaison or Father Lagrange see their positionreinforced by the discoveries of the illustrious Jesuit,
Father Jousse, on the psychology of language and the
oral transmission of the words of Christ. Actually,the exegetical difficulties raised against the Church,to my mind, carry little weight against the formi-
dable fact with which she is able to confront her
adversaries. This fact can be expressed in a single
word: Christ: that Man, that sign of contradiction,
who at a precise interval of time and space came to
divide human history into two parts. It is now a cer-
tainty that no objection of a historical nature will
prevail against Christianity's charm. The old reli-
gious chanson, which Jaures used to poke fun at,
12
SPOKEN IN SPAIN
once more assumes for discriminating minds the pro-
portions of a great symphony, at once human and
divine, though, unhappily, it no longer soothes the
souls of the masses.
A detestable charm it is, no doubt, in the eyes of
the humanist. For, as he sees it, by providing in the
person of Christ a visible model which man must
imitate, and by forcing him to recognize the distinc-
tion between right and wrong as it has been fixed for
all time, Christianity obligates him to sacrifice an
essential part of his personality in the name of values
that are out-of-date and no longer meet the require-ments of modern life.
The humanist will not abide any violence to his
ego; he accepts himself wholly as he is. "An honest
man," said Montaigne, "is a mixed man/' Christian-
ity's dreadful defect, to the humanist's way of think-
ing is precisely its desire to iron out our undulant
and multiform nature, on the pretext of uplifting
him and raising him to the level of the imitation of
Christ. This only diminishes and constricts him.
According to the humanist, we become Christians
only by sacrificing what is most truly ourselves. He
suggests, therefore, that we sacrifice nothing, that our
design of living (a design which will one day, per-
chance, be a living picture for others to admire)
WORDS OF FAITH
should include our virtues and our vices without
moral preoccupations, or at least without any pre-
occupations of traditional morality, by utilizing the
best and the worst in us that is, if we can speak in
terms of best or worst. Everything is good; every-
thing can help to create a heroic portrait; everythingmust be exposed to the risks of experience. It is in
this context that Andre Gide admiringly quotes
Montaigne's words: "There is no way of life so feeble
as that ruled by order and discipline."
But if Christian man is so diminished, so poor and
so meager, so compelled to follow outdated and out-
moded precepts no longer attuned to the basic needs
of his life, as the humanist says he is, how then is he
able solely by virtue of being a Christian, however
humble to behave in a manner so personal, so indi-
vidual, and so original? Whence does this supposedlymutilated Christian derive his almost overdevelopedinner life? I am struck by the fact that the concept of
personality professed by my friend Ramon Fernan-
dez is, by his own avowal, incapable of replacingCatholicism without itself assuming a religious char-
acter. He did not admit this to you the other evening,but he has written it. Once aware of our total re-
sources, we must risk our all, he writes, "as if by the
command of a God." That is what he says, but that
SPOKEN IN SPAIN
precisely is what can never be: God is not invented,
nor created.
And it is here that we come upon the ineffable
Christian mystery which at one stroke reduces to
nought the humanist's claim that the imitation of
Christ condemns us to a diminished and impov-erished state, the mystery which unveils the secret o
that burning personal life, and that ceaseless inner
drama which gives Christian destiny its intensity.
This uniform model, this unique Christ after whomwe are accused of wanting to pattern every human
being, is anything but a lifeless model, wholly ex-
ternal to us, whose features it is our job to copy as
patiently and skillfully as possible. Indeed, it is less
a matter of imitating or copying Him than of unitingourselves to Him.
Union with Christ: the very phrase is the answer
to the objection of the humanist. When St. Paul ex-
claims: "It is now no longer I that live, but Christ
lives in me," it is obvious that none of the traits that
characterized St. Paul's powerful personality were
attenuated or destroyed, but, on the contrary, were
infinitely strengthened. The Christ living in us
possesses us totally and He, much more than the self-
centered man, puts all to use; he changes water into
wine, transmutes vices into virtues in those secret
WORDS OF FAITH
nuptials of Cana performed in each of us. We are
not dealing here with mere proverbs or dicta which
together with the forces of heredity, habit, and edu-
cation might help us to live fairly good lives; it is a
living voice within, which in each individual case
makes known what is required. Nothing, in fact, is
less fixed, nothing less set or more personal than the
life of a Christian. Yes, I realize this means that
nothing is left to chance, that we know exactly where
we are going. "Be ye perfect as your heavenly Father
is perfect/' This commandment is for everyone. It is
a matter of our becoming saints.
This is true. However, if the direction is the same
for all, the prodigious diversity among the saints
whom the Church offers for our veneration is evi-
dence of how well she has succeeded in coping with
the problem of personality. In spite of the mystical
bond uniting them, what a difference between St.
Theresa and St. John of the Cross! And between the
latter and St. Ignatius Loyola! Each and every Chris-
tian life is an original creation. The diversity of reli-
gious orders in itself bears witness to what degree the
unique notion of the life of perfection comprises
differences, contrasts, and nuances.
And let us not hesitate at this point to take the
offensive. Let us dare to declare that Christ is the
16
SPOKEN IN SPAIN
greatest Creator of personalities that this world has
ever seen. These are words that come easily to one's
lips in the presence of fellow-countrymen of Theresa
and John of the Cross, of Peter Alcantara and Igna-
tius of Loyola. There can be no doubt. Christ living
within us annexes every part of us; like a magnetwhich attracts metal filings and clasps each particle as
in a close embrace, He draws, clasps, harmonizes,
divinizes our instincts, our passions, our feelings and
our thoughts. And from this multiplicity he re-
fashions in his love that immortal unity, our soul.
The humanist also is concerned about this same
problem of his own inner multiplicity. But he is
anxious to solve it alone, and, without relinquishing
any part of himself, to become someone, or in other
words, to realize his possibilities. But at the very out-
set he runs into a trap from which the humanist
rarely manages to escape. The desire to make himself
over, he finds, is not nearly so compelling as the
pleasure of watching and observing, of doting on self.
"Everything about himself/' writes Andre Gide of
Montaigne, "is to him an object of curiosity, amuse-
ment, and surprise." And so, fascinated with the flux
of his own states of consciousness, with the perpetual
motion within, he fails at first to grasp that what so
fascinates and amuses him is anything but an ano-
WORDS OF FAITH
dyne force. It takes some time to discover that this
inner world which he wishes to gaze on without inter-
fering is peopled with instincts to be feared. This
young animal whose feline grace charms us is hard
to imagine as the ferocious beast it is about to be-
come; but before long its capers take a dangerous
turn; its gnawing begins to pain, its claws draw
blood, and the wounds become poisonous.
Meanwhile, we find that our complacency and our
resolve not to interfere in almost every case favors
our lower instincts, those forces which distinguish
us least and depersonalize us most. Where shameful
actions are concerned, the greatest philosopher is no
better off than the scoundrel and the scamp. Whichis the same as saying that he who hopes to save his
personality, yet deny himself nothing, will lose it.
Aren't you claiming then, the humanist will say,
that life can be fulfilled by cautiously testing and
weighing every situation? Yes, for the materials onhand for the task are not purely passive and such as
you can take or leave at will. The things we do most
readily, the choices we feel most urgently compelledto make, are precisely those which the higher dictates
of our conscience reject. "We do not understand our-
selves/' said St. Theresa of Avila, "we do not knowwhat we want, and we go infinitely far away from
18
SPOKEN IN SPAIN
what we desire/' And echoing the word of your saint,
a great Frenchman and Catholic, Maurice Blondel,exclaims: "Sometimes I do not do all that I want; at
other times, almost without realizing it, I do what I
do not want to do. And once these deeds are done,
they weigh upon my entire life. I am, as it were,their prisoner."Whatever you may say, that which you call your
self is far from passive; you simply cannot make upyour mind to ignore it, you cannot unleash or check
those obscure forces as you would a force of nature.
Just as I thought, replies the humanist, you are
afraid. You think only of taking cover in religion.
Renunciation is always an act of cowardice; it is we,the libertines, who dare to live dangerously. To live
dangerously that is the important thing. Yes, that is
the only important thing. Not to be afraid of self, to
have the strength and courage to contemplate yourheart and body without disgust; to dare to impress
your personality violently upon your contemporariesand if you have genius, upon posterity itself even
though you may present the most shameful vices for
their applause. From this point of view, St. Theresa
or St. John of the Cross are no more impressive than
Nero or Caesar Borgia, and were no more accom-
plished. And in the final analysis, it is the splendid
19
WORDS OF FAITH
monsters who, having exposed themselves to the
greater risks, deserve most to be admired.
That to put it baldly is the humanist point o
view. In addressing a Spanish audience, obviously, I
have no need to defend the saints against charges of
weakness and cowardice. And indeed not only with
regard to saints, but even the humblest Christian
who strives to live by grace, there is obviously no
question of fleeing for cover or protecting
themselves from life's risks. No, it is a question of
love. But when one speaks of love one speaks of suf-
fering. And what love is more exacting than the
unique love? The sanctification of a soul is a long,
drawn out task, a day by day severance from the
world that entails obscure struggles, a prolonged and
silent heroism. It is quite the reverse of sleep, of non-
existence, of nothingness. Union with God is the
fruit of a superhuman victory. Shelter and rest, in-
deed! At times, your valiant St. Theresa herself could
not always suppress a cry of loving anguish: "O longlife! O cruel life! O life in which I no longer live!"
Truly, is not she who uttered this cry as much
possessed by an unearthly love as any humanist
would dare to be by his earthly love when he attemptsunaided to devise for himself a personal system of
thought and conduct?
20
SPOKEN IN SPAIN
I believe so. I believe that no matter how firmly a
man makes up his mind to be a technician, an en-
gineer of living, he cannot escape the famous di-
lemma that St. Augustine posed: "Love of self carried
to the point of contempt of God love of God carried
to the point of contempt for self." For we are not
inert bodies that can be exposed harmlessly to the
hazards of life. Human conscience is a fact; and it is
a living world in itself with laws all its own which no
one is at liberty to disregard on the excuse that his
concern is solely with practical living. Some of the
saints were kings, some soldiers, others were married;
and while they performed their duties of state fault-
lessly, they never allowed these to alienate them
from the inner world that world of the spirit which
offers signs to be interpreted, scents to be taken up,
and trails to be followed, all of which perhaps will
lead us where we would not choose to go.
As I see it, certain humanists make the mistake of
believing themselves lord and master of this inner
world, free to select some elements and to ignore
others. For example they feel they can disregard laws
whose existence a man so estranged from Christianity
as Marcel Proust affirmed in a famous passage of
La Prisonniere: "Everything in our life happens as
if we had entered it burdened with obligations con-
WORDS OF FAITH
tracted in some previous existence. Given the con-
ditions of human life, there is no reason in the world
for us to feel that we are obliged to do good or be
considerate of others. All these obligations which
find no sanction in the present life seem to be partand parcel of a different world founded on goodness,
sincerity, and sacrifice. It is a world altogether foreign
to this one, a world that we left behind to be born
on this earth, and will perhaps return to again, to
live under the sway of those unknown laws which wehave obeyed because we carried the knowledge of
them in our hearts, without knowing who put it
there. . . /' The Christian, however, knows what that
world is; and how clear this revelation of conscience
is in the light of the Revelation in history! How the
voice of Christ in history harmonizes with that of
the Christ within us! For the Christian, as well as the
humanist, looks within himself for the makings of
his personality. The whole difference is that he finds
within him infinitely more than himself.
From St. Augustine to Pascal, from Newman to
Maurice Blondel, the Church, as you know, has al-
ways had its apologists to point out to us where, in
our innermost selves, the ascent to God begins. It is
always through the medium of our personal life that
we attain to the transcendent. "The supernatural is
SPOKEN IN SPAIN
urgent within us/' And faith springs from the union
of this inner urgency and external Revelation. It
springs from a conformity between the Christ of his-
tory, forever living and teaching in the Church, and
the deepest aspirations of the human heart. TheChristian is a humanist who does not stop at the sur-
face manifestations of self, and who begins with the
human side in order to surpass it. I accept humanityas a starting point, but humanity itself contains seeds
of the divine. I deny there is any barrier between
the ideal and the real. Reality is permeated with the
ideal: "The Kingdom of God is within you/'To which, no doubt, the humanist will object that
he detects no such inner exigency of God in him-
self; he finds no traces of the divine within. Andhe is right. But will the humanist deny that his whole
intellectual and moral life begins with a deliberate
negation of the supernatural? He affects a certain
humility and reduces all to the business of practical
living and the management of daily needs; his reason-
ing starts with a denial of God. This initial resistance
to the transcendent, this impassioned denial preced-
ing all other steps accounts for the insensitivity of so
many modern thinkers to the things of God a culti-
vated and acquired insensitivity. They have torn upbeforehand every channel whereby grace might reach
WORDS OF FAITH
them. Nothing in the supernatural order can pos-
sibly affect them any longer, except for some thun-
derous intervention by God, like the thunderbolt
that struck down St. Paul.
Whatever they say about it, even among the most
hardened the longing for God betrays its presenceunder another guise. So as to get along without Godmore painlessly, they look for the equivalent of Godin themselves. They reject the Infinite Being, but
the obscure longing they feel for Him leads them to
believe in their own ability to create the divine. "Ah
yes," exclaims Ramon Fernandez at the end of an
admirable study of Newman, "the moment I reach
the deepest level of my being, I feel myself impelledto hope, to will, and to believe in a world different
from the one about me, and in a being different from
myself. But does not this world already exist in myhope, my will, and my faith? Do not these aspirationswhich I find only within myself disclose another side
of me, whether it be my self of tomorrow or a world
where others like me will live one day? Do they not
bring a message, these feelings which assail me from
all sides, like the scent of a forest in the deep of
night?" So he too catches these scents. Yet he denies
that they originate anywhere but in himself, that
beyond the shadowy forest a great light shines, andthat beyond this deep night a great love awaits him.
24
SPOKEN IN SPAIN
The truth is that many people repress the longingfor God. Repression, in the Freudian sense, has be-
come a commonplace today. Every deviation fromthe normal is explained in terms of repressed sexual
impulses. But few seem to have thought that perhapsthe divine urgency within us can also be repressed.There is no other answer to the man who insists hehas never felt this urgency within himself and whodemands proof in terms of pure reason. But here I
must make a confession.
As a novelist, I am used to living very close to the
secret places of the heart and seeing everything in
terms of the God of Pascal, "sensed by the heart, not
by reason." So perhaps in this brief talk I have not
sufficiently marked out the role of the intelligence in
the search for God. Far from deprecating the valueof intelligence, or speculative knowledge, Catholic
philosophy in France today is the vanguard of the
anti-Bergsonian and anti-pragmatist movements,thanks to the Thomist renascence, whose most dis-
tinguished protagonist among the laity is JacquesMaritain not to mention certain eminent theolo-
gians, Dominican and Jesuit. No doubt, if philos-
ophy were my profession, I would have accented that
renascence. But, I repeat, I am only a novelist, de-
cidedly ill at ease in the field of abstract logic andthe concepts of Scholasticism.
25
WORDS OF FAITH
Yes, a novelist. And here I must face an objectionwhich anyone at all acquainted with my writingscould hardly fail to formulate more or less precisely.
Obviously, it is poor taste tq talk of oneself, even
though it is only to accuse oneself publicly. But howcan I evade an objection that any opponent is boundto raise unless he happens to be as courteous as
Ramon Fernandez?
Your whole effort as a novelist, my critics would
say, gives a definite lie to what you have just told us.
Your heroes and heroines are carnal creatures of in-
satiable cravings, and it would seem as if God Himself
were powerless against the fire that consumes them,
against the concupiscence that destroys them. Pre-
cisely with reference to the supernatural, they would
say, your work demonstrates the inability of Cathol-
icism to solve the problem of physical love. For to
suppress a question is not to answer it. Catholicism
does not give the flesh its due, but confuses it with
evil; in fact, for a Catholic it is the evil of evils. Thusfor many it has dried up, and for many others mud-
died, the one spring in which humanity has found a
drop of joy. As a matter of fact, my opponent would
add, not only is the flesh not evil, but nothing worth-
while can be accomplished without it on any level
of activity. The great deeds and accomplishments
26
SPOKEN IN SPAIN
which reflect most honor on the human race are the
fruit of the ceaseless struggle to vindicate the claims
of the flesh against a pitiless Christian asceticism.
I make no effort, you must admit, to tone down the
objection. We must be honest about it, it is a strongone, and such as wins a hearing in every heart, even
Christian. For what Christian at some moment or
other has not endured the pangs of the flesh?
How could I deny it? It is quite true that as a
novelist I have been highly sensitive to the atmos-
phere of my generation and of those post-war genera-tions which had an Andre Gide, a Marcel Proust, and
a Freud as mentors. In common with them, I have
accorded altogether too much attention to physicallove. Almost without realizing it, a novelist is a wit-
ness who enregisters the most secret stirrings of his
times. And when our grandchildren come to form a
judgment of our era, the thing that will astonish
them most is the undue importance we have con-
ceded to everything relating to physical love, our in-
sistence on envisioning everything in reference to it
and explaining all things in terms of it. Sex has be-
come a fixation for a host of otherwise sensible peo-
ple, who in any other age would surely not have
made so much of it.
One of our moralists made the well known remark:
WORDS OF FAITH
"Many a man would never have loved, if he had
never heard speak of it!" No one can deny that there
has been a great conspiracy, as it were, not only in the
theatre, the cinema, in art, and in fiction, but in
medicine and the healing arts as well, to keep this
obsession alive among many who normally would
scarcely have given it a thought and especially to
keep it alive beyond those short years of youth whenthe body is vigorous and pure, and when nature de-
crees that human couples should perpetuate the
human race. Among uneducated people, amongpeasants who live close to the soil, it is a rare thing,
once the time for love is past, for the passions to come
back to trouble their middle age or later years.
A little while ago I spoke of the mania given
vogue by Freud's popularizers of reducing every-
thing in man to a repression of the sexual drive. But
even if there are many repressed individuals amongus, how many more who not only repress nothing but
who give free rein to passions, which are, to say the
least, unnatural, for having been deliberately aroused
and provoked.I realize this merely defines the problem without
solving it. It would be useless to deny that on this
point the Christian and the humanist are profoundlyand basically at variance. If chastity, purity, and vir-
SPOKEN IN SPAIN
ginity are considered Christian values, if the union
of man and woman though raised to the dignity of
a sacrament is still zoned off by Church prohibi-
tions and restrictions, that is because the entire mys-
tery of the world's Redemption by the Son of Godrests upon the mystery of the Original Fall. TheChurch does not trust the flesh because she knows
that the flesh fell with Adam. The humanist, of
course, holds this dogma in abhorrence; he denies
that nature is vitiated. And our Montaigne asserts:
"Absolute and godlike perfection consists in knowinghow to enjoy one's self fully."
In an informal chat like the present one, we can
merely establish the fact of this incurable opposi-
tion, without getting into a discussion that would
lead us far afield. However, it can be said in supportof the Christian point of view that the apparentlyexcessive seriousness with which the Church views
the carnal peril is justified by the facts. An English
Catholic, Chesterton, said something to the effect
that whenever something in Christianity seems ex-
traordinary to us, in the end it is because there is
something extraordinary in reality that corresponds
to it. Undoubtedly, the importance Christianity gives
to the flesh seems excessive. But there is, in fact, a
force within the flesh that is equally inclined to
29
WORDS OF FAITH
excess. Previously I compared our instincts, our
secret inclination to young and graceful animals
with which man thinks he can safely play until the
day when suddenly he finds himself face to face with
a ferocious beast. I repeat, man is not a mere repair-
mechanic faced with a machine that needs adjust-
ment; he is an animal tamer facing wild beasts. It is
a matter of daily observation that one can never do
enough for the flesh, that it harbors a formidable
energy, an appetite forever disappointed and never
satisfied, an almost infinite insatiability.
To this the humanist is always free to reply,
"Speak for yourself!" He can object that in every agethere has always been a certain number of men who,while lacking in every vestige of religious belief, have
known how to practise wisdom and moderate their
desires. Stoic virtue is not an empty phrase, and the
better part of humanity continues to endure hard-
ship and abstain from all excesses without on that
account professing any metaphysical reasons for
doing so. There again I can only underline the
opposition between Christian and humanist without
pretending to settle it in a few words. The point I
ought to develop, time permitting, is that the Chris-
tian above all realizes the weakness of human nature,
the vastness of human misery; and that, on the other
3
SPOKEN IN SPAIN
hand, the humanist always seems to be looking at the
image o an abstract man, strong and well-balanced.
The cross in every life, that personal, individual
cross made to our measure, which each of us mustsooner or later bear, the humanist does not see. Herefuses to see it.
Once more, I do not mean to belittle an opponentwho is often of heroic stature. Apart from any reli-
gious faith, we are all acquainted with souls that are
naturally righteous, noble through and throughsouls that bring to our lips Polyeuctus' prayer for
Pauline:*
Lord, in thy goodness grant me this,
She is too virtuous not to be a Christian.
Thou hast fashioned her with too much care
Not to let her know thee and love thee.
Yes, wisdom is no idle word, and it is that imprint of
God in the non-Christian world that I love best. Butmuch as I admire wisdom, it is a long way from sanc-
tity. There is the whole distance of love.
Like most of my contemporaries, I neglected in myworks to draw the necessary distinctions between in-
stinct and love. But Christianity, while putting us
fearfully on our guard against that instinct we have
in common with the animals, on the other hand en-
*Polyeucte (Corneille.)
3 1
WORDS OF FAITH
trusts the Infinite to our faculty of love. One need
know only a few lives of those myriad saints, who are
Christ's witnesses and recruits in the world, to smile
at the charge of constraint and impoverishment with
which the humanist reproaches Catholicism. The
news Christ came to bring men is that they are not
alone, that they are loved, that each of them in par-
ticular is loved. There is no greater love than to give
one's life for one's friends. Everyone of the faithful
knows he is the recipient of this immense predilec-
tion; and many have responded with the total gift. I
am amazed that so many people are scandalized bythe human element in the Church abuses, sins, be-
trayals in my view, the history of the Church be-
comes more and more the history of her saints; the
mystery of the Church merges with the mystery of
Jesus, for me it is enough to know that it is in the
Church and through the Church, thanks to the sacra-
ments she dispenses, that such perfect union with
God could be achieved as that of Francis of Assisi,
Catherine of Sienna, Theresa of Avila, the Cure of
Ars. Those dogmas against which there is no appeal,
that strict moral code from that soil alone, and no
other, such immeasurable loves have flowered, such
spiritual nuptials wherein the creature becomes lost
in the Creator are consummated.
SPOKEN IN SPAIN
And so it is that alleged weaklings and cowards
who, the humanist insists, take refuge in religion to
be at ease, are called, are led into a life of excess; for
in God alone every excess is permissible. They em-
bark upon a vast adventure, but not at the price of
self-mutilation; they go into it whole and entire,
with all their powers intact and with all their pas-sions transfigured.
The miracle of it is that, though the summit of
the spiritual life is attainable only to a smaller num-ber, there is no one who is not called to undertake it.
The miracle is that the most average Christian as
long as he retains his good will and does not neglectthe sacraments, the source of grace can pick up bits
and morsels, and even more, from the same banquettable at which God satiates His saints. The simplestbeliever can have a foretaste of what the heroic St.
Theresa experienced. Not only can he have it, he
should have it. We are not free to love or not to love;
to each of us individually St. John of the Cross ad-
dressed his warning: "At the end of this life you will
be judged according to your love/* You understand
what love St. John is speaking of here. Many whothink themselves furthest from experiencing it are
perhaps closer to it than they dare imagine.In all human love there is a deep-seated conflict,
S3
WORDS OF FAITH
a disproportion between the demands of the human
heart and the creature to which it attaches itself; all
novelists have devoted themselves to bringing this
fact to light. Paul Claudel says with penetrating in-
sight that woman is not happiness but a substitute for
happiness. Sometimes, like Don Juan de Manara,
man flits from creature to creature in quest of that
mysterious and inaccessible joy; sometimes he settles
down in marriage to look for happiness with one, and
this is the commoner lot. If we are to believe the
fiction writers who make marriage their theme,
happy marriages are rare indeed, and the wonder of
it is that so many couples survive the day to day mis-
understandings. If each spouse stands by the other, in
spite of everything, it is because creatures have an
innate instinct for cleaving to one being and be-
coming one with it. We can see, even in the case of
the more carnal, this latent urgency of contemplating
one alone, of uniting with one only, which marriage
almost always fails to fulfill. We cling desperately to
that phantom of an only love because we were created
for the Unique Love.
You are tempted, I am sure, to ask me what hopeI still hold for a return of French intellectuals to the
Church. You will remind me that even if influential
personalities are returning, if men like Paul Claudel,
34
SPOKEN IN SPAIN
Jacques Maritain, Maurice Blondel, and manyothers, have become the nucleus o an ardent move-
ment, they figure small indeed against the setting of
the whole of contemporary philosophy, which is so
brazenly indifferent, so hostile, as in my own coun-
try, to spirituality in any form.
I admit that is true. Of all the obstacles that
Christianity encounters in the case of many intel-
lectuals the most serious is doubtless the one I have
already pointed out: they have lost the sense of
human weakness. They fail to grasp the deeper mean-
ing of St. Beuve's remark: "Life is a contest that
must always be lost." Stoic virtue is a desperate lie
that must be maintained at all cost, not only in face
of illness and old age, defections and betrayals, in
face of death itself, but above all in face of those
appetites man gratifies in secret, in face of that vast
taint which from adolescence to senility creeps over
our entire being. So the time almost always arrives
when in order to save face they are forced to denythat this stain is a stain at all, and to assert that evil
is evil.
The Christian, in contrast, recognizes the fact of
human frailty. To Nietzsche, who sets up a race of
slaves as opposed to a race of masters or rulers, the
Christian replies that there are no masters, that all
35
WORDS OF FAITH
are slaves of the flesh but that it rests in our powerto achieve freedom in Christ. Why speak of humansorrow? Life for us is no longer a contest always lost,
but one arranged for us to win.
Time works for the Christian. As years pass and
the storms of youth subside, and nature itself calms
the impulses of flesh and blood, the Christian in the
state of grace puts a gradually stronger accent on
spiritual values. And the Spirit falls heir to all that
lust forsakes.
Far more than his opponent the Christian is a manof progress, literally and in the truest sense of the
term. Others believe solely in material progress,
progress in external space; we believe in inner prog-ress which is the sole reality.
Our idea of progress is fully expressed in Jacque-line Pascal's observation that "no limits can be placedon purity or on perfection." Even a St. John of the
Cross or an Ignatius Loyola never completed the task
of becoming saints. We need never fear that the
saints will distract mankind from its temporal duties.
There will always be plenty of technicians to take
care of the affairs of this world, but there will never
be enough sanctity here below to counterbalance
that raging concupiscence which leads to such fearful
destruction. I must say I cannot understand how any-
36
SPOKEN IN SPAIN
one today could fear an excess of spirituality in the
world.
This essential human wretchedness from whichthe saints forge their victories and triumphs, remains
forever incomprehensible to many intellectuals.
They are inclined to place their faith in a purelyhuman virtue; but in order not to see its fragility,
they must close their eyes to their own failures, their
own decadence. And when this ruse is no longer pos-
sible, and their decadence has become a spectacle for
all men to see, they glory in it and convince them-
selves that it is not decadence at all, but goodness it-
self. "The light has come into the world/' said Christ
to Nicodemus, "yet men loved the darkness rather
than the light, for their works were evil. For every-one who does evil hates the light." Yes, men love the
darkness better than the light, and this is the eternal
passion of Christ in the world until the end of time.
For a great many of our thinkers it is axiomatic
that philosophy is a search not a discovery. It is a
game in which one may seek but must never find,
except by cheating. To the savants of our century,and in fact almost every century, what is inexplicableand merits death is the simple affirmation of Christ's:
"I am the Truth/' Pilate's question: "What is truth?"
has been picked up again by the modern world, and
37
WORDS OF FAITH
with the very inflection of the procurator o Judea
so as to infer once again that it admits no reply.
Long ago when Christ declared that He was the
Bread of Life, the Living Bread come down from
heaven that gives itself for the life of the world,
many disciples finding this a hard saying walked no
more with Him. Only a small group of apostles re-
mained, and the words Christ spoke to them on that
occasion are those which I find more moving perhaps
than any in the entire Gospel: "Do you also wish to
go away?" Do you also wish to go away? Thus will
the Creator entreat his creatures until the end of
time.
Among our intellectuals, is it the little flock or is
it the vast throng which replies with St. Peter: "To
whom shall we go? Thou hast words of everlasting
life/' Unquestionably, the little flock. But what does
the future hold in store? When the Church is in
question, words like victory and defeat no longer
retain their customary meaning. Never do we find
her so helpless as in her triumphs, nor so powerful
as in her humiliations. Until the consummation of
the world we shall always find the same tumult
around the Cross, the same welter of insults and
mockery, and in particular, the same indifference of
Pilate, the same thrust of the lance by the careless
SPOKEN IN SPAIN
hand. But there will also be the prayer of the peni-tent thief, the tears of Magdalen, the centurion's act
of faith, the silent devotion of the beloved disciple.
Each of us must choose which role he will play in this
eternal drama; no one can avoid playing a part. Torefuse to choose is in itself a choice. You may believe
yourself free to assume a distinterested attitude to-
ward the Absolute. But what assurance have you that
the Absolute takes no interest in you? That is the
important thing.
The demands of modern life in no wise require us
to repudiate the eternal claims of God within us. It
is not within our province to renounce the Absolute,
or simply decide to devote ourselves to somethingelse. For Christ or against Christ we are bound to
choose. Failure to take sides is to have made a choice:
"He who is not with me is against me ..." Happyare those to whom it is given to understand that
apart from Him there is nothing.
39
II
What Can Christians Hope foron Earth?*
HAVE Christians a hope for this world? Actually,since the Christian is a man who believes he is also a
man who hopes, and not alone for happiness in an-
other life. The essence of our hope is its indivisibil-
ity: it is concerned with time because it is concernedwith eternity. There is no contradiction between ourbelief in a Father Who is in heaven and the comingof His kingdom on earth. We claim rather that the
contradiction is all on the side of the atheist, for wecan see no reasonable grounds for a temporal hopeon the part of anyone who lacks faith in eternal life.
Today the fraud has been unmasked which not so
long ago opposed the Nietzschean cult of youth and
strength to the religion of the vanquished and the
* Text of a lecture given at the Conference of Catholic Intellectualsof 1951.
40
WHAT CAN CHRISTIANS HOPE FOR ON EARTH?
misfits branded with the sign of the Cross. Who will
deny that the despair of this generation is fostered
by Zarathustra's, "God is dead/' that mournful cry
which has been taken up and orchestrated anew bythe young masters this generation has taken to heart?
If there is no God and everything, therefore, is
permitted, the first thing permitted is despair. Thefirst morose pleasure of the melancholy heart is to
indulge in the intoxicating notion that the world is
absurd, and that there is no point in our being less
absurd than the world. Hope, like faith hope, here
and now is a theological virtue. The Christian is
obliged to hope just as he is to be chaste, or to refrain
from hatred. Despair is a luxury we cannot indulge
in, a temptation to which we are commanded not to
yield. And how strange that it assails us in youthmore than at any other times. How strange that at
twenty we shed our bitterest tears; and now that life
begins to fade a degree of calmness comes, an accept-
ance of all that has been, that is, and that will be, an
intuitive grasp of what Bernanos meant when he putthose sublime words in the mouth of his dying coun-
try cure, "All is grace!" Yes, all is grace here on
earth. We know this, and we believe it, and at odd
moments we experience it in prayer or in the heart
to heart intimacy of a Communion.
WORDS OF FAITH
If God does not exist, and the world is without
direction or goal, if it comes from nothing and leads
nowhere, and if man is trapped in the dreary mech-
anisms of his daily work, a mere cog in a machine
whether serving private interests in a capitalist sys-
tem or serving the party or the State in a collectivist
regime then the man of today remains alien to
those things that make up the grim and monotonouscourse of his daily life. His mind which reasons and
reflects, his heart which longs and suffers, that part of
him, in sum, that is essentially himself, is not in the
least concerned with the nuts and bolts he tightens,
the tickets he punches, or the columns of figures he
adds in ledgers. If Christ is not risen and if our hopeis vain, every man is literally a prisoner. Even the
privileged few who escape from the shackles of forced
labor fall prey perhaps to a worse bondage, for there
are prisoners of pleasure and automatons of vice.
I am well aware that for a large portion of human-
ity today a great hope has crystallized around Com-munism. Yes, of course. Yet, by the very fact that
Stalinist Communism is identified with materialism,
its earthly hope is inwardly nourished, if I may say,
by a despair that limits it and hems it in on everyside. What despair? That which necessarily flows
from the proposition that spirit does not exist inde-
pendently of the body, but is merely a secondary
42
WHAT CAN CHRISTIANS HOPE FOR ON EARTH?
factor, a function of the brain, and that the material
world perceived by our senses is the sole reality. Cer-
tainly, we can see how Communism provides the in-
mates of this materialist prison with a motive for
awaiting oblivion. Of all the ways of "softening the
bed of straw/' to use Vigny's phrase, probably the
most tempting is, in effect, to work toward a future
in which the overfed will be made to disgorge, andin which production and consumption will be reg-ulated according to the laws of justice. To say noth-
ing of the fact that while awaiting the return to
nothingness it may be quite satisfying to feel oneself
in tune with History, and belong to the Party a
worldly power aimed at nothing less than the domi-nation of the world. Yes, it may be highly satisfying,even thrilling, to be part of an enterprise with the
whole planet for its stage and the human race as its
prize! And still, in the end, what does it all mean to
the individual, destined to disappear altogether? The
party, the party's struggles, its triumphs, will have
helped him to keep going, true. But his joy will have
been of a stereotyped kind, much like that of the
boys and girls we see grinning from ear to ear amidthe fields of wheat in all publications of totalitarian
propaganda. It is not the inner joy, the only one that
counts, true joy, our joy.
This joy of ours is noticed by our generation more
43
WORDS OF FAITH
than we Christians think. From time to time I amasked if I feel there is a religious revival underway.Well, no, not exactly a revival; let us say rather an
interest, a nostalgia. I know more than one atheist
who loiters on the outskirts of the humbled andhuddled flock we form. A flock, alas we can say
these things among ourselves that is not always the
sort to attract outsiders overmuch. For we also are
practised in the law that withers and the letter that
kills, yes, that has not ceased to kill even yet. . . . But
despite all this, something else remains, thank God,which it is not in our power to destroy, somethingwhich in spite of our mediocrity we carry within us,
and which without our realizing it shines forth. It is
that fire which Our Lord came on earth to kindle,
and which at this moment of time it is our turn to
keep aglow as best we know how, that fire which
keeps the animals away but attracts souls that feel
cold.
Souls that feel cold . . . There are many today.
There was a time, perhaps in a Huysman's day, whenthe Catholic liturgy was a beacon light guidingwriters and artists to the Church; and I personallycan testify to what the prestige of men like Peguy, of
Claudel, and later of Maritain, did to keep us faith-
ful in the dark days of Combism and of our own
44
WHAT CAN CHRISTIANS HOPE FOR ON EARTH?
twenty years. Today, however, young people rarelyread Huysman; Peguy and Bernanos are dead; Mari-
tain is across the sea; and the patriarchal Claudel is
gathering in his final sheaves.* No witness of greatstature has arisen this mid-century to voice his belief
that the Son of Man is the Son of God. It must mean,therefore, that the Son of Man has no need of anywitnesses but us, or rather, but Himself in us so
striking is the contrast between us who put our faith
in the Pater we recite and who believe in the Father
Who is Love and in His risen Son, between us whohave remained faithful, and this generation which
keeps alive all the myths our fathers found so stim-
ulating, this rather frantic generation which has
pitched its tent under the sign of the absurd at the
meeting place where all the pernicious ideologies of
the past century have finally converged. Marxism has
been tried out wherever Soviet Russia rules, andmillions toil there at forced labor to make men hap-
pier on earth. At Hiroshima and in the laboratories
of germ warfare, science fulfills the promise made at
its beginnings: "You will be like gods . . ." The reli-
gion of Progress and of human perfectibility is pon-dered at leisure by survivors of concentration campsand by
*
'displaced persons" lodged in their parti-
* Mr. Claudel died on February 23, 1955 (Transl. note).
45
WORDS OF FAITH
tioned barracks, who have left the cadavers of their
children behind them under the rubble of their
ruined cities not to mention those martyrs of war-
ring ideologies who have filled, and still fill, the
prisons of Europe to overflowing.We Christians who held fast to our hope, to our
enchantment amidst a disenchanted world can beginto understand why we embody humanity's last
chance when we contemplate the state of despair that
has overtaken mankind in our day and age. A dayand age when one can no longer find a single Social-
ist with the faith of a Jaures or a single Communistwho feels a personal bond with the cause of Slav
imperialism which he serves; when the world of the
concentration camp outlives the infamous regimethat gave it birth, and when in Russia the exploita-tion of man is without redress (since it is no longerthe employing class that exploits him, but the pro-letarian party itself, impeccable, infallible, and un-
limited in prerogative).
Hope here on earth? Yes, here on earth. I have not
forgotten the question I was asked to answer: HaveChristians a temporal hope? What my questioners
probably meant was: Have Christians a political
hope? Here I shall answer as a man for whom hope(except perhaps at the time of Liberation, and then
46
WHAT CAN CHRISTIANS HOPE FOR ON EARTH?
only for a few weeks) was never political. Under-stand me. I believe that Christian hope is concernedwith time, and with politics too, but as an antidote
to a poison. If there is one lesson that history has
never tired of teaching us, it is that the condition of
Christianity is worse when Christians hold political
power. Political Christianity, that is to say, the spiri-
tual power of the Church placed at Caesar's service
and the formidable arm of Caesar placed at the serv-
ice of the Church, has always had deplorable results,
especially in the France and Spain of the sixteenth
and seventeenth centuries, and even since then . . .
But these are burning questions affecting woundsnot fully healed. Let me merely point out that whenwe say that Christian hope does not lie in the polit-
ical order, this does not mean that we should re-
nounce politics, for to attempt to avoid political
action is the worst kind of politics. In most cases one
can avoid it only by an attitude of self-complacency,
by keeping silent, and by acting as an accomplicewithout assuming any risk.
At a time when in so large a part of the planet all
thought including the research of the scientists and
the inspiration of the poet is supervised, slanted
and controlled, it is we who believe in the word of
Christ, whatever our political allegiance, who share
47
WORDS OF FAITH
the earthly hope of preserving in the world the in-
violable conscience of man. This earthly hope of
Christians in the political sphere is, in fact, muchmore than just a hope. It is a certainty we have here
on earth that as long as there remains in the world a
Christian worthy of the name yes, even if there
were only one there will remain an inner life to
which no police can ever force entry.
Ah, you Catholics who are listening to me, how I
should like to make you aware this evening of the
immense happiness, the immense opportunity that
has been given to our generation. We Catholics of
1951 are sons of a Church which to our forefathers
of the Eighteenth and Nineteenth centuries repre-sented the enslavement of the mind, but which todayis freedom incarnate, even in the eyes of non-
believers. The slandered Church of the Syllabus nowshows its true face to the world. "The truth will set
you free" today we know that this is literally a fact.
The Nazis found it out, just as the Stalinists are
finding it out again. Wherever a Christian conscience
exists, a secret dialogue, a silent interchange will goon a tryst that no Caesar can surprise, before whichhe remains powerless. These intimacies betweenCreator and creature have in days past found the
prisons their favorite spot, and they still do today.
48
WHAT CAN CHRISTIANS HOPE FOR ON EARTH?
Only yesterday, as I read a letter from a prisoner I donot know, I could not take my eyes off the three
letters PAX surmounted by a little cross at the topo the cheap lined page. I did not worry about the
fate of that prisoner. He had achieved that state of
which Pascal tells us, where one has passed beyondthe possibility of hurt or help at the hands of menmore than that, where all the harm they can do us is
transformed into love.
And that is why all the techniques of the totalitar-
ians will always be bent upon forcing the door of this
last sanctuary of mankind: the Christian conscience.
And indeed, they appear to succeed when their
prisoner, struck at the very point where the soul andmind meet, stands before his judges witless andbroken. Yes, but even then, in spite of his torturers,
and perhaps without realizing it himself, a Cardinal
Mindszenty turns defeat into victory, because he
raises before the world the living image of his Cru-
cified Lord.
That we have the right to hope politically I be-
lieve with all my heart. And still, it is a mystery to
me seeing the age I have reached and all these
eyes have seen how devout Christians can look for
anything better than the return of the Lord, or how
they can bother their heads about anything except
49
WORDS OF FAITH
putting all in readiness for it, though it be thousands
of years away. So as to answer in advance the painful
question that Jesus once asked: "When the Son of
Man comes will he find faith on the earth?" Is this
any different from saying: "Will he find hope onearth?" For despair grows, as you can see, to the ex-
tent that atheism is victorious, and the world it
fashions is a world grown absurd in the eyes of menwithout God.
Naturally, we cannot help having political prefer-ences. I have nursed some all my life. I could well say
pf myself what Lacordaire said: that he would die a
penitent Christian and an impenitent liberal. Polit-
ical preferences, then, but not a political hope and
preferences, moreover, that we should control,
closely guard, and hold in check. Ah, if only the
young people listening would think over carefullywhat I have said, whether they incline to the posi-tivism of the extreme right wing or yield to the lure
of Marxism. To belong to a party of either extreme
means accepting orders and obeying commands.With any such party, you run the risk of espousinglies and hate most of all hate. You can be sure that
an apostle, whether layman or priest, who lives his
faith to the full, serves the political cause he favors
better than any partisan zealot. Who, for instance,
50
WHAT CAN CHRISTIANS HOPE FOR ON EARTH?
has worked harder for the proletariat than the elite of
our younger clergy? and I am not only referring to the
priests who have gone into the factories as workers.*
Who has done more for the working class than num-erous laymen, both men and women, particularly
those of the J.O.C. movement?** Truly, the politics
of this model Church we have in France is whollytaken up with the quest of souls, with opening upchannels through which grace may flow everywhere,even to places most difficult of access, in order to
reach souls there and save what was lost.
There is a basic contradiction between the polit-
ical life directed wholly at the outer world and the
Christian life directed wholly at what lies within. Nomatter how much a Christian, whether priest or lay-
man, lives for his brothers and with his brothers,
sharing their troubles and subjecting himself to the
same tasks, still it is only within himself that he seeks
and finds the kingdom of God. I imagine (and I ask
your pardon for daring to speak of such matters)
* The author's several references to the priest-worker movement in
this book were made prior to the difficulties in which some membersof this apostolate became involved, and to the Church's curtailment
of it. (Transl. note)**The J.O.C. (Jeunesse Ouvriere Chrtienne) signifies the Young
Christian Workers movement, which concerns itself with applyingCatholic social principles to the workers and their problems. (Transl.
note)
5 1
WORDS OF FAITH
that it must be communion with God through med-
itation, prayer, and the sacraments, that it must bethe life o grace within him that nourishes his apos-tolic efforts and makes them bear fruit. I imaginethat this hidden and deeply buried source of spiritual
living, known and accessible only to himself and to
God, is what he must preserve most jealously.
For me, the temporal expectation of a Christian,
his hope here on earth and I know no other is
never to lose or, if he has had the misfortune of losing
it, to regain the foretaste of his eternal hope: that
inner calm, that peace which the world cannot give,
but which the world can so promptly take away. In
the midst of the worst disasters of history and despiteall the sins of one poor life, this inner silence con-
tains the voice that reassures us, and through us re-
assures the whole world . . . Do you recall it? Thewords of Our Lord as He walked upon the turbulent
sea, and called out to the poor creatures tremblingin their boat? "It is I, do not be afraid."
Ill
Is Christian Civilization
in Peril?*
Is WESTERN civilization threatened? It may seem
strange that we even trouble to ask the question,
what with the Red Army camped at our doors and
able, i it set out tonight, to parade down the streets
of Brussels and Paris tomorrow morning. Moreover,
can we still speak o a threat at all? Has not the threat
been carried out already? Belgium twice invaded, oc-
cupied, and oppressed, France with the wounds in
her side still open, Germany in ruins, are there to
testify that on the day the Asiatic armies of Russia
sweep across Europe, they would only pile ruin on
top of ruin, only reopen ancient and half-healed
wounds. They would not destroy Western civiliza-
tion, but merely complete its destruction. They
*Text of a discourse given at Brussels in 1948 on the occasion of
the Grandes Conferences Catholiques.
53
WORDS OF FAITH
would knock down the remnants of a sublime struc-
ture already riddled with termites from within.
If by Western civilization we mean that which was
born of the fusion of the Gospel of the Son of Godwith the wisdom of the great men of ancient Athens
and Rome, that heritage of ideas, beliefs, morals and
customs which our forefathers have handed down for
a thousand years, we must admit that the physical
ravages which afflict Europe today are only the out-
ward signs of a destruction more hidden and more to
be feared. Although for the time being we can sleep
elsewhere than in cellars, although we are enjoyinga respite, and although the planes that bombed our
cities have been consigned to the scrap pile, their
task accomplished, and the models that are to replacethem are not as yet quite perfected, although, in
short, the visible destruction of Europe has been
halted for a time, the spiritual ravages continue
nevertheless to reach new depths. Certainly it is an
understatement to say they are most serious; for the
very destiny of the civilization we are discussing this
evening hinges on whether they wax or wane.
It would matter little if all our Churches were
levelled to the ground providing the truths that
built them still lived in the heart of Western man. If
the faith of our fathers, which has moved more than
54
IS CHRISTIAN CIVILIZATION IN PERIL?
mountains and caused our Cathedrals to spring from
the heart of Europe some few of which happilyhave escaped the blows of both our enemies and our
friends if that faith, I say, were still alive in us, it
would bring forth new miracles of stone, and per-
haps even of concrete. Many Cathedrals at which we
marvel are built on the site of still older basilicas
which must also have been very beautiful them-
selves; yet our fathers thought nothing of razing
them, or did not take the trouble to restore
them, because they knew that they bore in their
hearts the threefold source of all creativity: faith,
hope, and love. Is there enough of that love, hope,
and faith still left in our hearts, to enable us to re-
build what has been destroyed, in the spiritual as
well as the material order, even though atheism,
hatred, and despair are once more preparing to de-
stroy them? Our fate depends on the answer we can
give to this question.
In France we have all laughed a great deal at
the American soldier's remark about our ruined
Churches: "Well build much nicer ones for you.
. . ." Yet that naive remark is not so funny as it
seems. It expresses a profound truth. Namely, that a
nation which has confidence in its own civilization
has no reason for clinging to the relics of the past.
55
WORDS OF FAITH
The antiquarian spirit of Europeans today is an
alarming sign of age and impotence. It testifies to the
fear that their source of strength has dried up. The
young American, bursting with confidence in him-
self and looking wholly toward the future, can be
flippant about our ancient and gloomy Churches,
every stone, every slab of which is hallowed for us.
We should not be hard on him for his disdain that is
a sign of his youthful vigor.
Unfortunately, for ills of the spirit America has
only material remedies to offer us. Not that we can
scorn them! Understand me: I have no taste for the
role of the ungrateful beggar; and while it may be
true that man does not live by Bread alone, he lives
by bread first of all. Starving Europe ought to speak
only with gratitude and friendship about those whofeed her.
But, in the end, Occidental civilization does not
find its full expression in machine-tools, nor in re-
frigerators, nor in any of those manufactured goods,which force their makers to find markets for them or
perish. The forces in a moribund Europe that still
resist death do not originate in America, but here,
in Belgium, in Holland, in Switzerland, in Italy, in
Spain, in Portugal, in Germany, in the Scandinavian
countries, in Great Britain, in France; in this Europe,
56
IS CHRISTIAN CIVILIZATION IN PERIL?
of which America is now more than ever the tribu-
tary. For she, also, would die the same death, if the
fire that Europe lit and kept alight for a thousand
years should fail; America, too, would perish of the
cold. America is but an offshoot of ours, a formidable
one, to be sure; but its sap still flows into it from the
age-old trunk; and she in turn is already and un-
wittingly suffering from our exhaustion.
This fact helps us to understand why to manycountries France, though humiliated, in ruins, pos-
sessing the mere shadow of an army and a navy, and
floundering in disorders and internal confusion, still
stands and perhaps more than ever before as the
nation from which we can look with hope for those
things which wealthier and more industrialized na-
tions cannot give. And when I say France, it is
European Christianity I have in mind, of which you
Belgian Catholics comprise one of the most illustri-
ous branches; it is European humanism which yourartists have so magnificently enriched.
Here is the point I feel should by all means be
emphasized: it is we the Europeans, despite our col-
lapse, upon whom the responsibility for Western
civilization still rests. The aid we receive from across
the Atlantic will help us enormously; in fact, it is
indispensable. Nevertheless, it would be of little help
57
WORDS OF FAITH
if we failed at the same time to take cognizance of
the fact that in the spiritual struggle which divides
the world the spiritual weapons to be used have been
entrusted to us from the start, and first of all to us,
the Catholics of Gaul.
In a sense, we might say that we Catholics are the
beneficiaries of the dramatic events through which
the human race is living, since what is happeningconfirms what we have believed. The present era is
like a great crossroads upon which all roads have
ominously converged ever since, through Nietzsche's
voice, men proclaimed the death of God. In this uni-
verse of horrors where the will to power of two op-
posing empires lines up the human robots on two
sides, it seems, as Saint Theresa said, that we have
gone infinitely far from what we have desired. Our
forefathers dreamed of relieving man of the weightof his oppressing circumstances, and man has become
the mere human material from which the anonymousdivinities of the State exact nothing but efficient
production and then, when the day of reckoningwith the rival race arrives, the acceptance without
murmur of his final immolation.
Science, which our fathers deified and in which
they invested all their hopes for a paradise, and per-
haps immortality, here on earth is becoming each
58
IS CHRISTIAN CIVILIZATION IN PERIL?
day our most effective death-dealing instrument. Andthis is stating it mildly, when we consider that the
very planet itself is in danger of dissolution and an-
nihilation.
Everything is happening as though the Infinite
Being, to convince us, Cartesians that we are, is
resorting to the criterion of evidence evidence that
a world without God is a world condemned to turn
its own genius against itself. So much so, in fact, that
the slightest advance in the discovery or the masteryof nature's laws cannot be made without its becom-
ing another step toward the destruction of the
species.
Yes, God's witnesses have the consolation today of
not only believing, but seeing and touching, if I dare
say it, the fact that when He in Whom they believe
said: "I am the life/' it should have been taken lit-
erally, and in the most physical sense of the word.
"The misery of man without God": how feeble that
phrase of Pascal's sounds today! Misery is the veryleast we can say. With love vanishing from the earth,
man has become just one more species among all
others in the vegetal and animal world which
mutually devour one another.
As Christians, we confirm the fact that History has
proven us to be right. We confirm it, however, with-
59
WORDS OF FAITH
out pride or self satisfaction but with a sense of shame
and anguish. For all the horrors that have come uponthe world have occurred only because of our spiri-
tual poverty; and this is not the least of our crimes.
Before Western civilization was threatened by the
Red army, by Marxism, or by atheistic Existential-
ism, it was first threatened inwardly in the Christian
conscience. Those whose mission it was to keep the
fire aglow let it die out. All those victories of death
over life during the last century and a half were wonthanks to our incurable phariseeism, and thanks es-
pecially to the failures of political Catholicism
failures which Karl Marx turned so prodigiously to
his own advantage.In these few moments, I can only suggest to you a
few themes for meditation, a few threads of thought.I should like you to think about this last point at
your leisure, for I cannot develop this highly contro-
versial question without giving offense and reopen-
ing certain wounds.
No, it is not with satisfaction or complacency that
Catholics consider themselves trustees of the salva-
tion of the human race, even in the temporal sphere.For they cannot at the same time fail to recognizetheir own tragic failure to adapt to the needs of mod-ern society. Too often they feel cut off from their
60
IS CHRISTIAN CIVILIZATION IN PERIL?
times, as though isolated in a sort of Christian ghetto.Sometimes they have the feeling that grace is distrib-
uted to mankind only through old, out-of-date con-
duits half clogged up with the rust of centuries.
At this point, however, let us hasten to add that
some changes are in progress. One of the most hope-ful signs is the splendid effort of the Catholic hier-
archy to revitalize the methods of the apostolate, an
effort which not so long ago would have been viewed
as imprudent, even rash. Yes, judging by what is
happening in France today, a great hope has been
raised. The sordid garage of Montreuil, where a
priest of the Mission de Paris celebrates Mass and
explains it to a crowd to which no one had ever
before spoken of Christ, this garage, I say, shines in
the eyes of God with a brilliance perhaps greaterthan that of Notre Dame de Chartres. In the economyof grace perhaps those little bands of Dominicanfriars which evangelize our dechristianized country-side occupy a higher place than our most famous
Abbeys. Who can say that their poor hymns do not
swell in eternity with a quality unequalled by the
albums of Solesmes?
Yet on one crucial point we have to admit a
serious falling off. From the beginning of the last
century up to our own generation, Catholicism has
61
WORDS OF FAITH
been able, despite a materialism triumphant on every
side, to count among her apologists minds of the
highest inspiration. From Chateaubriand and De-
Maistre, from Lamennais and Lacordaire, to Huys-mans, to Bloy, to Claudel, to Peguy the intellectual
leaders in whom the youth of my country confided
were disciples of Christ. And yesterday again, in the
assemblies of UNESCO, held in Mexico, by all ac-
counts it was the voice of our Jacques Maritain that
was listened to more than any other, and that struck
the deepest chords in the hearts and minds of the
participants.
It may be that I am incapable of recognizing the
teams on our side. But after all, faced as we are today
my Marxists, atheistic Existentialists, pseudo-Surreal-ists, whom have the younger generation producedthat can speak with the power and authority of a
Peguy or a Claudel? It may well be that from now onwe need only saints. And already we can see this
modern sanctity taking shape little by little; webegin to see its true features in the city streets, the
suburbs, and in our countrysides. Now that Francein many of her Provinces has become a missionaryland once more, the apostles of the new times are
taking on the features of those who at Christianity'sdawn evangelized a world in which the Name that
is above all names was heard for the first time.
62
IS CHRISTIAN CIVILIZATION IN PERIL?
I should like to be able to end on this note of hope,but what is the use of closing our eyes? The saints sowtheir seeds, but the sowers of weeds mingle with
them, and the master they serve is at our gates with
his countless army. In my homeland, Marxism has
apparently reached its peak, and I doubt that it will
make further gains. Its strength today rests on the
Red army, and the strength of the Red army in turn
rests on Russia, that immense, oppressed and un-
happy land, of which as much as a century ago the
Marquis de Custine wrote: "By a degrading sub-
missiveness at home she is paying in advance for her
hope of imposing tyranny on other countries." Whatthe Marquis wrote of the Russia of the Czars applies
exactly as well to the Russia of the Soviets. It is as
true today as a hundred years ago that "to compen-sate the loss of all his freedom, public and personal,the kneeling slave dreams of conquering the world/'
Obviously, there is an equal and probably superior
power pitted against Asia. But, how else would Asia
move but by first occupying all of Europe? And what
good would it be to us if America, after years of
preparation, landed her troops here merely to lib-
erate cemeteries and ruins?
Still we should not believe that war is inevitable.
No war is inevitable, as long as human free will re-
mains one of the essential ingredients of History.
63
WORDS OF FAITH
And there is something else in which we believe, and
that is divine grace. Let us cany on, then, as if West-
ern civilization were not going to perish, let us strive
to lead it back to the source of living waters from
which it has drawn its power and its glory. But let
us act also as if our civilization might be attacked at
any moment from without just as it is every momentfrom within. Each one of us should always have in
mind this question: How can we preserve the peace?Since war today, whatever its outcome, would annihi-
late us.
Two theories confront us. Either Soviet Russia
has already secretly decided upon war, as Hitler did
long before Munich, and is simply waiting for the
propitious moment particularly the American crisis
that she has been counting on, and that would leave
her free to act. With Europe occupied, the Soviet
government may think its exhausted and terrorized
nations would prefer anything to the Apocalypse of
an Anglo-Saxon landing; and that would be the mo-ment for Russia to reach an understanding with the
United States of America for dividing the world into
two parts.
On the other hand, Soviet Russia dreads a war,
but at the same time fears having it thrust upon her
by a rival. She is haunted by that fear of encirclement
which drove imperialist Germany to the aggression
IS CHRISTIAN CIVILIZATION IN PERIL?
of 1914. According to this second theory, each of the
two Empires would live in terror of the other, andthe danger of war would be born one day fromthis mutual terror.
Peace will be preserved, and our civilization with
it, as long as Russia considers the Western world to
be impregnable, and as long as she fears exhaustingherself hopelessly, not so much against what is left
of Christian and humanist Europe, as against its for-
midable American offspring. It is the task of Western
diplomacy to convey to Soviet Russia the impressionthat we have not locked and bolted the door. Wemust let her know that, contrariwise, if the bolt is
fastened on her side, it is not on ours, and that we are
always ready to welcome Holy Russia again into the
European family.
Unfortunately, nations do not change very easily.
And how could they change when their geographicaland ethnological conditions remain the same? Like
the Russia of the Romanovs, the Russia of Stalin
rules its people with so heavy a hand that the verysurvival of the regime requires that all its subjectsbe denied all contact with free nations. And this is
even more the case today than under the Czars, whenat least the nobility could know Europe and be ex-
posed to its influence. Today the Russian people live,
work, and suffer as if on another planet.
65
WORDS OF FAITH
So let us not hope too much to avert by diplomaticmeans the menace that hangs over us. But as long as
war has not engulfed us, we can take advantage of
them. The nations of the West must stand constantly
at attention, alert to the flood-gates in the very heart
of Europe, extending from Prague to Budapest,which could burst open in an instant and send
across our civilization a dreadful flood today yes,
infinitely more dreadful than in the days of GenghisKhan. For there is no nightmare more terrifying to
the Humanist and the Christian than the spectre of
this Asiatic tidal wave equipped by modern science.
The unity of Europe should be born of this threat.
Already the Western statesmen have no choice but to
adopt a common foreign policy. The imminence of
the danger is great enough to bring about a renas-
cence of Christianity. In the past it was the Arabs,then the Turks, whose mere presence at our gates
brought into existence our ever vigilant Europe.Their presence alone created that Western chivalry
always ready to give its life, that world so quickened,alert, and taut, where every person counts because
he has an immortal soul, where the mind is free, andwhere genius flowers without having to account to
anyone or follow any party line, where honor is the
only rule imposed on everyone.
66
IS CHRISTIAN CIVILIZATION IN PERIL?
Oh, I am well aware that Western Christendom
has not been a world without crime. Graham Greene
was right to remind us that Christendom has com-
mitted practically the same crimes that we have seen
flourish in Germany and, alas, not in Germanyalone. The point is, however, that Christendom was
a world where evil remained evil and where, as
Graham Greene phrases it in a striking epigram:"The possibility of great repentance was equalled
by the possibility of great crime/' whereas we live
in a world where evil has been made the good. There
is nothing sadder in the world than to see what wehave seen and still see the crime of the totalitarians
who mobilize in their service the generosity of youth,
arid its spirit of sacrifice, and that greatest love of all,
which is the gift of life itself. . . .
We have to rebuild Christendom. And, undoubt-
edly, we cannot hope to do this by artificially piecing
together our broken society. The Christendom must
be reshaped from its foundations. It is not a matter
of building dams against Communism; dams always
end up by being swept away. We have to pit one hope
against the other, a new world order against the ter-
rible order which rules in Moscow, and which
through the intermediary of the national Communist
parties, rules also in Belgrade, in Sophia, in Buda-
67
WORDS OF FAITH
pest, and in Bucharest, as it would rule tomorrow in
Brussels, Paris, and Rome, should the delegates of
the Kominform seize power there.
In Russia class struggle has produced only the
semblance of a classless society. Actually, it is the
same people the most inured to suffering in
the world whom the eternal Czar, the eternal Peter
the Great sacrifices to the Slavic will to power. There
is, of course, something impressive in the scale of the
undertaking being worked out in Eastern Europe.Our own should be equally gigantic in scale. It wouldbe naive to imagine, as some men do who fancy them-
selves shrewd and realistic, that one can change the
course of history with dollars and that gold is the
final answer to everything. The war that ranges con-
tinents against each other today is a religious war.
Of course, sordid interests also enter in, as they have
in every crusade. But that does not prevent it from
being a clash of ideas. We must not forget that the
enemy's ideas are everywhere and always workingon the minds and hearts of men, and in America too.
Russia will never forsake the hope of seeing her
enemy crumble from within. She has in her service
termites slowly and patiently gnawing at the main
girders. Patiently, ah yes! Patience is a virtue which
the Russians have practiced for as long as they have
68
IS CHRISTIAN CIVILIZATION IN PERIL?
known oppression, that is to say, as long as they havelived.
It is important that we also be moved by a spiri-tual principle capable of acting upon minds andhearts we are unable to reach directly. We have noiron curtain against Communism. But, on the other
hand, there is no iron curtain, thank God, that a
passion for liberty and a respect for the human beingcreated in the image and likeness of God cannot
pierce; there is no iron curtain against an inerad-
icable Christian hope.It is not the kingdoms of this world, I realize, to
whom it was promised that the gates of hell wouldnot prevail against them, but to the Church. To the
extent, however, that Europe once more becomes a
Christendom united in a common faith, she partakesin the promise. Formidable as is the threat which
hangs over us, we refuse to despair of the fate of
Europe so long as its cause remains linked with that
of Redemption. And if the worst should come, westill would not despair. As St. Augustine lay dying in
Hippo, he could well have thought that civilization
was at an end; yet it was, to the contrary, only begin-
ning. Even if a wave of mud and blood inundates
Europe, we believe that what ought to be saved will
be saved and men of good will will not be con-
founded.
69
IV
An Author and His Work*
THE last subject that the man o letters whom youhonor this evening ought to touch on is, I should say,
himself and his work. Yet how can I help thinking of
that man and his work, of those poor stories and that
simple French writer, who by grace of the Swedish
Academy suddenly finds himself all but overcome byan extravagance of honors? No, I do not believe it is
vanity that impels me to review the long and windingpath that has led me from my obscure childhood to
the place I occupy among you tonight.When I first began to describe the little world of
yesteryear that lives again in my books, that smallcorner of a French province, scarely known even to
Frenchmen, where the vacations of my school dayswere spent, I had no idea that I would attract atten-
tion of foreign readers. We are all quite convinced
* Text of the speech delivered In Stockholm, in 1952, on the occasionof Mr. Mauriac's acceptance of the Nobel Prize for literature.
70
AN AUTHOR AND HIS WORK
of our utter singularity. We forget that the bookswhich we ourselves found enchanting, those of
George Eliot or of Dickens, of Tolstoy or Dostoievski,or of Selma Lagerlof, describe countries very differ-
ent from our own, people of another race and an-
other religion; and yet we loved them, because we
recognized ourselves in them. All humanity is in this
or that peasant back home, and all the landscapes in
the world coalesce in the horizons familiar to ourchildish eyes. The novelist's gift is precisely his powerto make plain the universal quality concealed in that
sheltered world where we were born, and where wefirst learned to love and suffer.
That mine has appeared so somber to manyreaders in France and elsewhere, has, I must admit,never ceased to surprise me. Mortal men, by the veryfact that they are mortal, dread even the name of
death. And so, too, those who have never loved nor
been loved, or those who have been forsaken and be-
trayed, or who have in vain pursued someone beyondtheir reach, without so much as glancing back at the
one who in turn pursued them and whom they did
not love even such people are astonished and dis-
mayed by works of fiction which describe the lone-
liness ofhuman beings even in the arms of love. "Tell
us the things that please us/* they say, as the Jews
WORDS OF FAITH
said to the prophet Isaiah, "deceive us with pleasantfalsehoods/'
Yes, the reader asks to be deceived by pleas-
ant falsehoods. And yet the works that have lived
and still live in the memory of man are those that
accepted the human drama as a whole, and did not
falter before that incurable solitariness in whose
bosom each one of us must live and face his destinyuntil death, that final solitude, since in the end wedie alone.
Such is the world as a novelist without hope depictsit. Such is the dismal world into which your great
Strindberg transports you. And it would have been
my world also, if from the first strivings of conscious
life, I had not possessed a great hope. A hope that
pierces like a flash of fire the gloom I have described.
Black is my color, and people judge me by this, and,for some reason or other, not by the light that pene-trates it and burns there secretly. In France everytime a wife attempts to poison her husband or
strangle her lover, people say to me, "There's a sub-
ject for you ..." I am supposed to have a kind of
museum of horrors. I specialize in monsters. Andyet, on one essential point my characters differ fromalmost all of those that populate our present-dayfiction: they are aware that they have a soul. In this
AN AUTHOR AND HIS WORK
post-Nietzschean Europe where the echo of Zara-
thustra's cry: "God is dead/' reverberates still, and
where the fearful results of it have not yet fully run
their course, perhaps all my characters do not believe
in the living God; but they are all aware of that partof their being which knows evil and which is capableof not committing it. They know what evil is. Theyall feel somehow that they are responsible for their
actions, and that their actions in turn affect the des-
tiny of others.
For my heroes, however worthless they may be, to
live is to participate in an infinite movement, an in-
definite surpassing of self. Human beings who do not
doubt that life has a direction and a goal are not
prone to despair. The despair of modern man is born
of his belief in the absurdity of the world his de-
spair and also similarly his addiction to myths of sub-
stitution. It is, in the last analysis, the sense of the
absurd that makes man inhuman. The day Nietzsche
proclaimed the death of God, he heralded at the same
time the terrible days we have lived through and the
days still to come in which the human person,
emptied of his soul and thus denied a personal des-
tiny, is made into a beast of burden. More abused
than beasts of burden, in fact, by the Nazis and bythose who still employ their methods today; for a
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horse, a mule, or an ox at least have cash value, but
the human animal, procured without cost thanks to
a well devised system of purges, is worth only as
much as he can produce until he collapses.
A writer who focuses his work on human beingmade in the image of the Father, redeemed by the
Son, and illumined by the Holy Spirit could never,
possibly, as I see it, be considered a master of de-
spair, no matter how somber a picture he paints.
True, the coloring still remains somber. That is
because he sees human nature as wounded, if not cor-
rupted. It stands to reason that the human story as
told by a Christian novelist is no idyll, since he is for-
bidden to shut his eyes to the mystery of evil.
But to be obsessed by evil is also to be obsessed bypurity, by childlike goodness. I am sorry that someof my critics, reading too hastily, fail to notice the
place that children occupy in my stories. A child's
dream is the keystone of all my books: children love
and exchange their first kisses, and for the first time
experience loneliness all the things I cherish in
the music of Mozart. People see the vipers plainly in
my novels but fail to see the dove that nests in manya chapter, because in my works childhood is the lost
paradise where the first acquaintance with the mys-tery of evil is made.
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AN AUTHOR AND HIS WORK
The mystery of evil. . . . There are no two waysabout it: Either we must deny its existence, or else
accept it in all its manifestations within and without,in our personal history and passions as well as in the
history of external events, written in human blood
by the will to power of empires. I have always been
convinced that individual and collective crimes are
closely linked; and in my capacity of journalist I have
only tried to make clear that the day to day horrors
of our political history are no more than the visible
consequences of the invisible history unfolding in the
secrecy of the human heart.
We who live beneath a sky still streaked with the
smoke of crematoriums, have paid a high price to
find out that evil is really evil. Before our very eyeswe have seen these crematoriums devour millions of
innocent people, including children. And the story
goes on. The concentration camp system is taking
deep root in age-old lands where Christ has been
loved, adored, and worshipped for centuries. Withterror we watch that portion of the globe where menstill enjoy the rights of man, where the human mindis still free, contract before our eyes like the piece of
shagreen leather in Balzac's tale.
Do not imagine for a moment that I am blind to
the challenge which the existence of evil in the world
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poses for my faith. In the Christian outlook evil still
remains the most agonizing of mysteries. The manwho in the midst of the crimes of history perseveresin his faith has still to reckon with the perduringscandal: the seeming uselessness of the Redemption.The reasons given by the theologians for the exist-
ence of evil have always left me unpersuaded, rea-
sonable as they are, in fact just because they are so
reasonable. The answer that eludes us is not of the
order of reason, but of charity. An answer contained
wholly and entirely in St. John's words: "God is
love/' Nothing is impossible to that Living Love, not
even to draw all things to itself, and that too, is
written.
Forgive me for broaching a problem that in every
age has stirred up so many commentaries, disputes,
heresies, persecutions, and martyrdoms. But, after all,
it is a novelist talking to you, the one you have pre-ferred to all others; so it must be that you attach somevalue to what has served as his inspiration. Very well,
he can assure you that the things he has written in
the light of faith and hope does not contradict the
experience of his readers who share neither his faith
nor his hope. To cite another case, we find that
Graham Greene's Christian view of life does notdisturb the agnostics among his admirers. Chesterton
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AN AUTHOR AND HIS WORK
remarked that whenever something extraordinaryoccurs in Christianity it is ultimately because some-
thing extraordinary in reality corresponds to it. If wewere to pursue this point further, we would per-chance discover the reason for the mysterious appealthat works of .Catholic inspiration, such as those of
my friend, Graham Greene, have for the vast de-
christianized public which devours his books and
delights in his films.
Yes, a vast dechristianized public! As Andre Mal-
raux has expressed it: "Revolution today plays the
role once played by eternal life." But what if the
revolution is the myth? And life eternal the unique
reality?
Whatever the answer, we all agree on one point:
this dechristianized humanity is a humanity crucified.
What power on earth can ever destroy the complicitybetween the suffering of mankind and the Cross?
Even your Strindberg, who plumbed the lowest
depths from which the psalmist cried out, yes, Strind-
berg himself expressed the desire, I am told, to have
engraved on his tomb a single phrase, a phrase which
alone suffices to force the gates of eternity: Crux ave>
spes unica!* He, also, who suffered so much sought
repose in the shelter of that hope, and in the shadow
* Hail, oh Cross, our only hope. (Transl.)
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WORDS OF FAITH
of that love. And it is in his name that your laureate
begs to be forgiven for these all too personal remarks,
which perhaps struck too serious a note. Yet could he
better repay you for the honors you have heaped
upon him than by opening to you not only his heart
but his soul? And having delivered to you the secret
of his torment through his characters he owed it to
you this evening to let you know the secret of his
peace.
V
Anguish*
IT is not without certain misgivings, and I might say
not entirely without anguish, that I find myself last,
after so many eminent speakers, to talk to you on
anguish. In the first place, I did not have the goodfortune of hearing them, so I run the risk of repeating
many things they said. Moreover, my topic is one of
the foremost themes of contemporary philosophy;and I am the last man in the world who could be
called a philosopher; or, if I am, it is without myknowledge and consent. Besides, unlike the philos-
ophers, I am a long way from accepting anguish, or
enduring it. But who am I to dispute with them?
What a piece of ill luck for a simple novelist to
be born in an age when philosophers rule even in
the world of fiction and in the theatre! He does not
cut a very intelligent figure speaking as he does in
*A lecture delivered in Geneva on September 10* 1953.
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WORDS OF FAITH
the language of every day; any child who happens bycan understand him.
You will be indulgent with me, therefore, if I con-
fess that in preparing this lecture I did not reread
Kierkegaard, or the existentialist philosophers of
Germany and France. And when I say "reread/' youcan see I am boasting; you must remember I was born
in Gascogny. But take my word for it, in speaking to
you on anguish, I prefer to forget what the philos-
ophers have written about it. In treating a subject as
hackneyed as this one, I think the best way is for us
to suppose that no one had ever discussed it before,
and to see what our own souls and long experiencehave to tell us about anguish, about our own private
anguish. This is the anguish which we learn from no
one else, and which chokes our heart from the mo-ment we first realize that there is something tragic in
the mere fact of being a living man a man con-
demned to die who enjoys a reprieve of unknownduration. A reprieve, however, that grows shorter
year by year; so that our life is much like the pieceof shagreen leather which Balzac's hero watches with
terror as it shrinks in his trembling hand until it is
hardly bigger than a coin.
Anguish is so much a part of man's estate that it
manifests itself from earliest childhood, and how
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cruelly! If you have the gift of retracing the pathwaysof your life from its beginnings, if the child you used
to be is still a familiar memory, you will recall so
vividly as to feel, and live again through, the first
terrors of an unlighted room. You can hear the slow,
heavy steps on the stairs, as you hide again beneath
the sheet. You can feel the hot tears on your cheeks,
as from your schoolboy's cot you watch the gas-flame
cast flickering shadows on the dormitory wall. Per-
haps, you too were a small boy somewhat bullied,
who did not feel quite as strong as the others in a
school yard full of shouts and quarrelling. Perhaps
you quailed at the thought of being called to the
blackboard by a scornful teacher so adept at makingan idiot of you in front of the whole class.
Perhaps there was also a room in your house where
a few months or a few years earlier someone had
died, and where the shutters remained closed for-
ever as if upon a horrible mystery. Every object there
seemed touched by the dark enchantment of the
place: the water glass, the motionless clock, the
sunken-in armchair near the fireplace where no fire
would ever again be lighted.
Yes, for many a child anguish is a secret and perma-nent state which could become the onset of madness
if it were not for that unstinted tenderness with
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WORDS OF FAITH
which his mother showers and caresses him at every
moment of the day, and even in the dead of night
with all its terrors, when suddenly he feels a cherished
hand on his forehead and the gentle breath in his
hair, and when he hears the voice softly chiding:
"What's the matter, my silly little one? What are
you afraid of? I am here. Now close your eyes and
go to sleep."
And of what were we afraid? Here is one fact these
childhood memories help us to establish: Anguishdoes not come from outside, and it is in no way bound
up with the catastrophes of any particular epoch. An-
guished child that I was, I lived at a time when the
only war we knew concerned King Behanzin, and
when, as the refrain of the blind man in the court-
yard of our house reminded us, the French flag had
just been planted in Madagascar. People around us
argued a great deal about a man named Dreyfus; but
his misfortune meant little to us. And all persons of
consequence whom I saw, and who personally would
not have as much as harmed a fly, feared only one
thing: that Dreyfus would not be cashiered and con-
demned for the second time. My anguish of later
years was already alive in this small child of a well-
to-do family in a Third Republic that was middle-
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class, powerful, wealthy, and pacific though proneto conquest of an uncostly sort.
Of course I do not claim for a moment that
the age of disasters which began in 1914, but
whose first rumblings could be heard long before,
did nothing to foster modern anguish, or that there
is no relationship of cause to effect between the woes
of our times and the existential anguish of "the
being in the world/' Nevertheless, even though these
events have been tragic enough to cause us to confuse
our anguish with the vicissitudes of History, they did
not create it. Let us say they would not allow us to be
diverted from it in the sense Pascal used the word
nor to deny it. It is my belief that even in periodsof history which present nothing particularly tragic,
in peaceful and happy times (peaceful and happy at
least for the privileged ones, for there are no happytimes for the working class) mankind was no less
prey to all the misfortunes that being a man entails;
to the sorrows of him who loves and is not loved, whois loved but cannot love in return, who has had a
son and lost him, who was young and is young no
longer, who has been strong and virile and one dayhears the doctor say after a prolonged examination,
"Perhaps an operation might help. . . /' and whohears the automobiles in the street, a radio on the
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WORDS OF FAITH
floor below, a woman's laughter, knowing withal that
in six months he will be dead.
And even if he is spared such trials there is still
ahead what Michelet told us is torture enough: old
age, with its failure of one function after another,
the decline of the mind, the gradual and stealthy ap-
proach of inevitable dissolution.
At the outset, I agreed to proffer nothing on this
subject except what grew out of my personal experi-
ence. Right here, therefore, I am obliged to part
company with Michelet and many others. This is the
fork in the road, and after having talked to you in
such depressing tones I would now exclaim, as Father
Lacordaire once did to his congregation at Nancy,
"My brothers, I bring you happiness."But it was a sermon that began like that, and I
shudder at the thought that this too is a sermon,which a simple layman like myself ventures to deliver
before you. What a paradox, when I think of howlittle attention I pay to my own pastor's sermons.
However, we are all like that: we preach to others,
but do not care to be preached to ourselves. One day,Paul Claudel, who had just endured a homily, said
to me, "It is really incredible, you know, that Chris-
tianity was spread by preaching/' But what else did
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he himself do all his life, our beloved and great Clan-
del, but spread the word of God? And what is there
for any of us to do in this world as many as we maybe if we belong to Christ?
So you must pardon me if I make bold to use
Father Lacordaire's words and say, "I bring you hap-
piness/' I am well aware that a large number of mylisteners this evening are not Christians in belief.
But even they do not look for anything but a Chris-
tian talk from me, I feel sure. They would be aston-
ished, indeed scandalized, if for reasons of expedi-
ency, I refrained from giving voice to what in myview is the only happiness, the one happiness that has
not disappointed or betrayed me. I bring you happi-
ness, the kind of happiness a Christian begins to dis-
cover at my age. The fact is that as I have grownolder, age has relaxed its grip. "As a man grows older
he becomes more conscious of eternal things/' Ro-
mano Guardini has written, "He becomes less
restive, so that the voices coming from beyond can
be heard more clearly. As eternity closes in, the real-
ity of time begins to fade." I remember a prayer o
St. Gertrude, who must have been very old when she
recited it, in which she calls Christ, "Love of the eve-
ning of my life/' and invokes Him in words that I
find so beautiful: "Oh, my Jesus of eventide, give
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WORDS OF FAITH
me rest in tranquil sleep." But all this was already
expressed at the very dawn of the Christian era,
when the aged Simeon embraced the infant God:
"Nunc dimittis servum tuum, Domine . . /'* ReneBazin never penned a finer line than the one I read
on his tombstone: "When age overtakes us, all things
forsake us, but God comes."
He does not come as a defense which we conjure upagainst anguish. On the contrary, it was throughoutour stormy youth when anguish was our permanentstate that we would not turn to Him, that we keptaloof from Him. No, it is not our anguish that creates
God, rather it is the peace and quiet which comes in
the wake of a waning life and enables us at last to
pay attention to the Response that has been offered
us without cease throughout the whole of our trou-
bled life. But we preferred to remain in our suffering,because we preferred to cling to our sin. What moredo I know today than I knew as the desperate ado-
lescent I was then? Actually, it was not knowledge I
lacked, but a love of happiness, a love of peace. Howlong it takes to learn how to love. Since the days of
old Lucretius, it has been taken for granted that fear
is the creator of the gods; and in one form or an-
*"Now thou dost dismiss thy servant In peace, O Lord. . . ."
(TransL)
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other the philsophers have gone on reviving this old
theme, which can be found today again at the core
of the Nietzschean and Marxist offensive against
faith in the Infinite Being. I told you at the start
that you should expect nothing from me on the sub-
ject anguish that is not taken from my own personal
experience. Well, my experience shows that far from
fearing anguish I loved it, preferred it to God Him-
self. So little, in fact, did it prompt me to create an
imaginary God to gain relief from it, that, contrari-
wise, I sought reasons and excuses to flee from that
loving Presence within and around me, to which I
preferred the sadness that is born of lust.
No, it is not anguish that creates the Father in
heaven whom Christ taught us to know and love.
Quite the reverse, it is that melancholy pleasure of
our never ending youth yes, never ending, because
the heart stays young long after youth has departed.
It is this dark enchantment with anguish which dis-
poses us to turn away from God and even deny that
He exists, and which supplies us with proofs and
arguments against His goodness and against His love.
Doubtless you will object that this is not true of all
men, but only of writers and poets, who prize their
anguish as the very source of their inspiration, and
very particularly that form of anguish which is the
WORDS OF FAITH
fruit of the combat between a desire for God and the
flesh. Yes, perhaps ... I have often quoted and ap-
plied to myself Maurice de Guerin's figure of speechwhich compares his thought to a heavenly fire burn-
ing on the horizon between two worlds. It is this
distress of a person torn by the choice between Godand the world, which is in fact at the root of manyartists' struggle and which is at once the source of
their torment and their delights.
"If thou didst know the gift of God. . . ." said
Christ to the woman of Samaria. And what is the gift
of God? The very opposite of anguish. "I leave you
peace, my peace I give you/' said Our Lord to his
friends on that last night before entering his agony.
This peace is precisely what we do not want, and it
fills us with dread, because, I repeat, we do not love
peace. "Rise up, O tempest of our desire!" This cry
of Rene at the dawn of the romantic era reveals the
vocation of unhappiness that many of our young folk
have chosen. The poets of despair were the ones to
whom we first turned, and it was the eternal sadness
in the prince of darkness that first attracted us. Aliterary pose? Yes, of course but a strange sort of
posturing, this despair which in surrealist circles has
so often been authenticated by suicide. St. John de-
nounces it, this hatred of peace, in the first lines of
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his Gospel: he tells us that the light came into the
world and men refused it, because they preferreddarkness. A man seeks the shadows in order to in-
dulge himself and not be seen. The victory of Christ
in his life is the difficult acceptance of peace in the
light.
I understand very well the objection you all musthave in mind: Christianity itself is an anguish, andindeed it is not enough merely to say that a Christian
anguish exists. All critics of Christianity of the nine-
teenth century accused it of being contrary to Na-
ture, of casting a shroud over the world, of maligninglife. What is the answer to these charges? Is their
truth so overwhelmingly apparent?I make no attempt to dodge the issue. Christianity
is a word that has covered many conflicting tenden-
cies, which have found Christians themselves at log-
gerheads. With the result that those who were called
to love one another have gone so far as to burn one
another at the stake. . . . One of these tendencies
that of St. Augustine, of Calvin, of Jansenius was
conceived in a spirit of fear and trembling, of anguishin its harshest sense. For there is also an anguishthat is sweet, the anguish of love, which consists
wholly in the regret at having offended the loved
WORDS OF FAITH
one, in the fear o being no longer loved, or of no
longer feeling love ourselves. The love of the crea-
ture for the Creator is no more immune than anyother human affection from what Marcel Proust calls
the intermittencies of the human heart. But youunderstand very well that it is not this kind of distress
that we mean when we speak of fear and trembling.I told you before that I am not a philosopher.
Neither am I a theologian, and I ask the pardon of
any theologians who may be listening to me this eve-
ning if I venture on their terrain. They can be sure,
my steps thereon will be few indeed. Let it suffice for
me to remind you that the Christian anguish which
Nietzsche denounced stemmed wholly and entirelyfrom the Jansenist obsession with individual salva-
tion.
And when I say "Jansenist," I am not unmindfulthat I am speaking in the city of Calvin; it is simplythat for a French Catholic, it is easier to talk of Jan-senism than of Calvinism the more so because (andI am reluctant to tell you this) Port Royal was myparish. I hasten to add, however, that the Jansenistdoctrine of grace has never found a place among mybeliefs, and that Mr. de Saint-Cyran has always im-
pressed me as a theologian of the most sinister make.Let us say, in any case, that in France, not to mention
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any other country, Port Royal remains the principal
source of that anguish which is rooted in the obses-
sion of personal salvation.
In accord with an unforeseeable design, the Infi-
nite Being imparts or denies His grace to His crea-
tures stained from the moment of birth, totally
impotent in all save evil, but where evil is concerned
as potent as a god. Thus we are consigned naked,
trembling, and defenseless into the hands of this
arbitrary infinite being. Such is the provenance of
this anguish.
Never fear, I do not claim to be able to settle in a
few words this evening a question that has engagedthe best efforts of a whole line of Christian thinkers
through the centuries especially as I would be un-
able, for instance, to tell you just where Pascal differs
with Luther and Calvin and with the doctrine of
justification by faith alone. I can only point to youthat permanent wellspring of anguish and even of
despair, which a certain type of theology causes to
gush from the heart pierced by its lance. This doc-
trine has bred that numberless and pitiable family,
that scourge of Catholic confessors, the scrupulous:
men and women alike, obsessed by trifles, adorers of
a meddling divinity who must be approached by all
sorts of ruses. I believe it was the very irreverent
9 1
WORDS OF FAITH
Andre Gide who used to lampoon Catholics for their
"salvation cramps." Cramps so painful that many
young men who began by following Christ left Himin order to escape from the scruple, the obsession of
having to render an accounting of the least thought,
their slightest desire. They ended by casting their
entire Christian heritage overboard. "The marvelous
thing about Communism/' one of these youngsters,
turned Marxist, told me one day, "is that my personal
salvation no longer interests me/'
Well now, what I want to suggest to you as a
defense against that form of anguish, is another
anguish: an anguish that generates peace and joy.
What I prescribe is a sort of spiritual homeopathy,the cure of anguish by means of anguish.
The obsession with personal salvation will never
be mastered and overcome until the problem is trans-
posed onto the level of charity. Not, of course, that
we should cease to cherish the hope of salvation, nor
that the whole life of a Christian should not tend
towards eternal life and the possession of its Love,
which is Christ. A passionate desire for salvation, yes
but not a fixation, not an obsession in the patholog-
ical sense of the term. In my youth many of us were
charmed by the words Pascal puts into the mouth of
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Christ: "I was thinking of you in my agony. I shed
this particular drop of blood for you/' May I confess
that they charm me much less today, because I detect
in this desire for a drop of blood shed for ourselves
in particular the satisfaction of one who is preparedto consign the most of the human race to eternal
reprobation, and who is not at all distressed by the
thought of being set apart in a little flock of the elect.
Anguish transmuted into charity, anguish for
others, frees us from the fear aroused in so manysouls by the mystery of predestination. It frees us
from that preoccupation with personal salvation
not so far as it is good and necessary, but so far as it
is morbid. Now our anguish no longer concerns our-
selves alone; it encompasses humanity, or at least
that portion of it which we regard as "our neighbor/'
and which may include a whole social class, or even
an entire race. For a priest-worker or for one of our
pastors of a poor parish, the entire working class is
his neighbor. Just as for so many of us the neighbor
was the entire Jewish race in the days of the Nazi
persecution and at the moment I have occasion to
know from personal experience how far the devotion
and love we feel for a persecuted race can go.
For some of our contemporaries hell consists of
other people; but for us, others are Christ. He told us
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WORDS OF FAITH
Himself that the Son of Man came to seek and to save
those who were lost yes, all who were lost, not
merely this or that person for whom He had partic-
ularly consecrated one scant drop of blood.
Surely, I would be an odd sort of Christian if I did
not believe that the Christian life means first andforemost a personal relationship with God for each
one of us; if I did not believe the words: "You have
not chosen me, but I have chosen you"; if I did not
understand what Newman meant by "My Creator
and L" It stands to reason that extension of our
anguish to the measure of suffering humanity will
only bring forth its full fruits if our apostolate is
rooted in a close intimacy with Christ. It is, and al-
ways has been, my belief that the Christian life is
essentially a friendship, a love, in other words, the
most personal and most individual part of us. I have
always believed that every one of us has been called
by name. Preceding every conversion there is alwaysthe meeting at the crossroads of which Father La-
cordaire speaks: that adorable Being, demanding,
refusing to let us go, Whom nothing discourages, to
Whom we prefer so many creatures that forsake us or
whom we forsake. But He is there, always there, and
indeed, never so near as when we think He is far
away, awaiting His hour, which for so many souls,
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alas, is their last hour, when all further chance of
betrayal is gone.What did our Love do, what did this Christ do,
Whom every faithful soul strives to imitate, but take
all human anguish upon Himself? We, therefore,
should also shoulder our share of it. The saints did
so literally, to the point of identifying themselves
really with the Son forsaken by the Father in the
horror of night. Bernanos penetrated deeply into the
secret of that holy agony. And it is this which endows
his priestly characters, especially his country cure,
with a mysterious dimension. For us, simple mem-bers of the Faith, it is enough to be one with our
brothers in their anguish, as Our Lord Himself ex-
perienced it.
It seems to me that it is to the credit of the Church
today that they have a better understanding of all
this than the generations preceding us. The Church
in France especially offers admirable examples in
this regard, some of which are well known, such as
the Mission de Paris and the priest-workers. Thenthere are the Dominican Friars who have entered
the active apostolate and the new Orders of Little
Brothers and Little Sisters of Father de Foucauld,
both cleric and lay, who in factories, fishing boats,
and on the docks, in the leprosariums, and in the
95
WORDS OF FAITH
medinas of the Orient put into practice the vow of
absolute poverty, which Father de Foucauld was un-
able to obtain from any one while he lived; it is our
generation, thirty years after his death, that will
answer his call.
That, ladies and gentlemen, is the curious remedyfor anguish which I prescribe peace and joy that are
the offspring of our anguish: "Peace I leave with
you, my peace I give unto you: not as the world
giveth, do I give unto you/' We now understand
the profound meaning of this last promise made bythe Son of Man before entering upon His agony.At the summit of anguish this peace and joy is to be
found, which consists in uniting ourselves each ac-
cording to his vocation to the suffering of the
hungry, the persecuted, the imprisoned, the tor-
tured, the exploited. Such is the Christian paradox.As I near the end of my talk, there is one thing
that disturbs me. The fear that you might get the
impression that to my mind the great portion of
humanity which lives outside the pale of Christian
hope is by the same token doomed to despair. No,most assuredly, I do not believe this. But I served
you notice at the outset that I would reveal to youmy own personal defense against anguish, the onlyone I know. I am not blind to the fact that innumer-
96
ANGUISH
able human beings follow other paths. The fact that
they put their whole faith in the earth does not deter
them from working with all their might hopefullyand joyfully for the dawn of a new humanity.Where they are concerned, however, I want to
correct what I said at the beginning of this talk to
the effect that the events and catastrophes of historyhave no real influences on human anguish. Onsecond thought, I would say that is not true for
people who pin all their hopes on the "progress of
lights" as they used to say in the eighteenth centuryin the future of science, and in the advent of
social justice. How can anyone deny that human
hope as it existed in France in 1789, and later at the
outset of the industrial era, has suffered setbacks of
the bloodiest kind and has continued to suffer themsince 1914 and as we advance into the atomic age?We know the price that had to be paid for man's
mastery over matter and his acquisition of its most
secret laws. In this connection, we have only to men-tion Hiroshima; the mere word tells the story, and
always will.
The same thing is true of the Communist revolu-
tion, which on a significant part of our planet is
already an accomplished fact, and has a long historybehind it. You will understand why I do not wish
97
WORDS OF FAITH
to develop my thought on this subject here. I have
said enough, however, for you to understand that
human anguish is linked to the events of history
insofar as these events destroy the object itself of our
hope. The atomic bomb in the field of scientific re-
search and the concentration camp in the field of
social revolution are cause enough, I should say, to
unsettle the faith of those who have believed passion-
ately and exclusively in human progress.
We Christians know that earth-bound expecta-tions and hope are not the same thing, that it is
possible to have lost all hope for the temporal salva-
tion of mankind and still await the Kingdom of God.
We await it confidently, even in the era of the
atomic bomb and the concentration camp. I hasten
to add, however, that our hope is not concerned with
eternity alone; it is also concerned with the grimworld of the living. For whatever crimes the will to
power may lead to in visible history, they cannot
prevent the leaven of which Christ speaks from
doing its work, ceaselessly, in the human masses. Thefire He came to cast on the earth burns quietly andwithout fail beneath the surface; and the most
bloody years of history are none the less years of
grace.
"Thy kingdom come/* We ask it in the Pater, and
ANGUISH
for nearly two thousand years since this prayer was
first taught to us millions upon millions have uttered
it in the absolute certainty of one day being heard.
But we have already been heard, the Kingdom has
already come. It is within us. So that we are never
defeated save in appearance; and since our anguishis the very condition of our peace, our defeat is the
very condition of our victory. "Have confidence, I
have overcome the world." He who threw this chal-
lenge to the world did so at the very hour when he
was about to be betrayed, outraged, mocked, andnailed to the gibbet of slaves.
St. Paul tells us that all of creation groans andsuffers the pangs of parturition. Our anguish is like
labor-pains which to the ephemeral creatures that
we are seem interminable. Still we know, we whohave kept the faith, what the outcome will be. Tosuch of our contemporaries as have succumbed to
anguish and may be about to lose heart, the onlyconsolation we can offer is what St. Paul said to the
faithful of Rome: "Who shall separate us from the
love of Christ? Shall tribulation? or distress? or perse-cution? or danger? or the sword? But in all these
things we overcome, because of him who has loved
us."
By what right or what authority do you say this! I
99
WORDS OF FAITH
feel I must ask myself this one last time, for I have a
very strong feeling that I am being impertinent, not
to say shameless. Moreover, I have had qualms about
a letter which I found at the desk of my hotel the
evening I arrived. It was from a young Swiss who
expressed indignation that I would dare to appearon this platform, I who am, you are to understand,
one of the main persons responsible for modern
anguish.
Undoubtedly, this Genevan youth rates me too
highly. If I had never written at all, I do not believe
that human anguish would on that account have
been alleviated in the slightest degree. But, after all,
it is quite true; every writer, every creative artist is a
fomenter of trouble. He demoralizes in the very lofty
sense that Andre Gide said he wished to be a de-
moralizing influence; that is, by forcing man to see
and know himself as he really is, not as he wouldlike to appear; in short, by compelling him to dropthe pose.
Shall I confess something to you? The older I
get the less I experience any scruple for havingoffended in this way. For the sad thing, after all
we can probably agree on this point at the end of
our talk is not that so many people feel anguish,but on the contrary, that they do not. Or that they
100
ANGUISH
feel anguish only for themselves, and that assaults
against the human personality, of which they have
been eye-witnesses and too often accomplices, do not
disturb them in their tranquil possession of privilegesor in the exercise of their will to power.
If there is an anguish which ought to be con-
quered and overcome, there is another which is the
manifestation of the spirit in us, its very breath. This
is the good anguish, of which there must be no cure.
No, under no circumstances must it be cured, be-
cause it is a sign that the soul is alive within you,that soul which has been entrusted to you and from
which an accounting will be asked for the portion of
human anguish that God knows it ought to have
assumed. That is the meaning of the terrible words
of St. John of the Cross: "On the last day, you will
be judged on love."
101
VI
The Living God'
WHEN we pronounce the name of God, what
thoughts does it arouse? In all the years we have
spoken of Him, who have we meant by God? Whowas He, when as children we first began to pray to
Him and perhaps to love Him? "I knowwhom I have
believed/' St. Paul declared to Timothy. But, truly,
do we know in Whom we believe? It would be a
mistake to think that the desire to be sincere is all
we need to give a clear reply to this question. I amasking you as I would ask God if I were alone, andwith the same determination that I would then haveto say nothing but the truth. Here, however, we are
not in the comforting realm of clear and distinct
ideas. Moreover, short as the span of human life is, it
is very possible that the child, the adolescent, the
young man, the adult, and the aged, while invoking* Text of a lecture delivered at the closing session of the Conference
of Catholic Intellectuals of November 1953.
1O2
THE LIVING GOD
the same name, have perhaps not invoked the same
Being.In my own case, at a very early age God was the
same for me as He is today; very early I pursuedHim or fled from Him along the same paths on whichI still run breathlessly today. Oh, without a doubt,
when I was a child, God must have seemed to me as
Francis Jammes describes Him:
I believed that God wasAn old man with snow-white hair,
Who always gave you what you asked Him for.
But did I really believe this? I suppose I did. And
yet, for as long as I can remember, it seems to methat my thoughts did not rise by themselves toward
the Infinite Being. I recall how in Bible Historythe very name of God seemed vaguely suspect to
me, because the God of the Jews was nothing like the
One I knew and loved. Did I know Him, then? Andlove Him? Yes, of course, and though I cannot saywith certainty when it was, I believe that the In-
carnation was my starting point, that He first entered
my life as the God Incarnate. I cannot possibly im-
agine how the mere child that I was could have
come upon the living God except through Christ.
It was, no doubt, because there was someone like
103
WORDS OF FAITH
myself, with a body like my own, whose heart of
flesh was prone to love and to suffer like mine, some-
one who as a child was crucified in His crib longbefore He was on His Cross, someone I knew and
could talk with in secret at any time; it was because
one day Christ taught me to say, "Our Father Whoart in heaven/' that I knew and believed that heaven
is where our Father is. Because at every moment of
his earthly life Christ repeated "My Father/' I knewthe Being beyond all imagining to be a living person.
Very early in life, apparently, I was unusually at-
tentive to the words of Our Lord, especially in St.
John, where the Second Person of the Blessed
Trinity gives testimony to the First. For me, JesusChrist was a witness of the eternally living Godheadas the apostles were witnesses of Christ, living, dead,
buried, and risen. But Our Lord does not only use
the words "My Father" or "Our Father/' He also
says "The Father": "The hour is coming, and is nowhere, when the true worshippers will worship the
Father in spirit and in truth. For the Father also
seeks such to worship Him/' Here the simple in-
definite article, more effectively than the possessive
pronoun, brings home to us that infinite paternitywhich has been, is, and always will be concerned
with the life and death of every person; that paternity
104
THE LIVING GOD
which embraces all of us, from Adam to the last man,as mysterious as Adam, who on the last day will drawthe last human breath.
Here for me, Christ again intervenes directly. It is
He who inclines my mind to grasp the mystery of
this myriad paternity. It is the mystery of the
Eucharist, that total gift of Our Lord to each faith-
ful member of the flock who communicates each
morning throughout the world, almost as if there
were no one else in the world but we who receive
Him and He who gives Himself to us, that mysterywhich we have used and perhaps abused for so manyyears, that intimate and habitual contact yes, I sayit is this mystery that introduces us to the idea of the
Father Who gives Himself wholly to every singlehuman being. If you asked me which words of OurLord carry the greatest assurance as to the in-
scrutable Fatherhood of the Infinite Being, mysteryof transcendence swallowed up, as it were, in the con-
tingent world of every day, I would remind you of
the ineffable verse which no doubt you all know byheart that promise which the faithful Christian
never ceases to meditate upon, and whose fulfillment
he can verify within himself, if he keeps himself
the least bit clean. It is the ggrd verse of the
fourteenth chapter of St. John: "If anyone love me,
105
WORDS OF FAITH
he will keep my word, and my Father will love him,and we will come and make our abode with him."
I realize how suspect is any mention o experienceo experimentation in these matters. Nevertheless,
how can we fail to recognize that this promise appliesnot only to saints but also to sinners; I mean to those
who repent, struggle, and strive to remain faithful.
I have no doubt that there are many people whohave attained to the living God mostly by using the
reason God gave them, and that they first saw the
light through their intellect and understood before
feeling drawn. But, whenever one of them treats mewith a sort of affectionate disdain, as sometimes
happens, I take comfort in repeating to myself those
words which will not pass away: "No one cometh to
the Father but by me." And again, "I am the door of
the sheep ... I am the door. If any man enter by mehe shall be safe."
Though I cannot say exactly when, I believe it
was in very early childhood, probably about the time
of my First Communion that these words of OurLord which speak of the Father, My Father, and OurFather, Whom we approach only through Christ,
introduced me to the living God. But as soon as I
began to search for an intellectual justification of myfaith when I reached the age at which even the
106
THE LIVING GOD
least philosophically-minded awaken to the world o
ideas it was my discovery of Pascal between myfifteenth and seventeenth years that made me fully
conscious of what I had vaguely experienced. Thanksto him, I became imbued by a train of thought from
which I have never since departed. I realized that I
belonged to a particular spiritual family which
though very large was always a bit suspect. NeedI remind you here that when Pascal wrote: "It is the
heart that senses God, not reason. That is what faith
is: God grasped through the heart, not through rea-
son. . . ," in referring to the heart he did not meansome sort of perception by the senses, or gushing of
feeling. To him, knowledge by means of the heart
was the intuitive grasp of first principles. It is not
the intelligence which comprehends, said he, but the
heart which senses "that there are three dimensions
in space, and that numbers are infinite."
This God of Pascal's, reached intuitively, is not,
moreover, God the First Cause or God the Prime
Mover, Who in the beginning imparted the initial
impulse which sent the universe on its way. Nor is
He God, the Lawmaker, the hair-splitting Judge,Who rewards and punishes the trembling humanflock. The first words written on the piece of paperwhich Pascal wore stitched in the lining of his coat
107
WORDS OF FAITH
tell us all we need to know; "God of Abraham, God
o Isaac, God of Jacob, not of the philosophers and
scholars/' They summarize the fragment from the
Pensees with which doubtless you are familiar, but
you will forgive me if I repeat it at length here again.
In dealing with a subject which, I dare say, over-
whelms us even though we may be bursting with
it, and even though it includes what we hold dearest
and for which even the weakest and most cowardly
of us would, with the help of grace, give his life can
we do better than go over in our hearts words which
have been and always will be a revelation for us?
Furthermore, it seems to me that the essence of the
mystery upon which all your thoughts have been
centered during the current week is fully expressed
by it: "The God of Christians is not a God Who is
simply the Author of geometric verities and of the
order of the elements; that is the view of pagans and
Epicureans. He is not merely a God Who exercises
His Providence over the lives and fortunes of men,
to bestow a happy span of years on those who adore
Him; such is the portion of the Jews. But thejGodof Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, the God^cfthFChris-
trans, is a God of love^ arid consolation:^ a God Whofills the souls"an^'6odies of those He possesses, a GodWho makes them conscious of their inner wretched-
108
THE LIVING GOD
ness and of His Infinite Mercy, Who becomes one
"with them in their inmost soul, Who fills it with
humility, joy, confidence, and love; Who makes
them incapable of any other goal than Himself/'
Such is the living God. And still, Pascal did not
tell all. Perhaps like all the men of Port Royal and
members of their spiritual family, he was excessively
concerned, even obsessed with the problem of indi-
vidual salvation. And as for the drop of blood shed
particularly for us I am not so sure today as I was
in my youth that it is good to dwell thereupon
too complacently. We are not members of a small
trembling band of the elect cut off from the repro-
bate hordes of humanity. The Son of Man came to
seek and to save that which was lost. He told us so
Himself. The living God, revealed to us by the Son
as the Father, as our Father, is known to us by an-
other name, which defines Him in His very essence
a name written everywhere in the Gospels, under-
lying everything the Son said of the Father, but
which it was given to St. John to confide to us on two
occasions in his first Epistle: "God is love/' It is notJL
|^nWlwlW*isa"s^,^T 7Wrfc-,w ^n^rsw^^wn,-*-*-"11**
we who have loved God, but He Who has loved us.
Ask the true lovers of God a St. Francis of Assisi,
a St. Vincent de Paul what are the implications of
109
WORDS OF FAITH
this thrilling truth. Or in today's dark world, ask our
clergy in poverty-stricken parishes (and what parish
has no poor?) , the Little Brothers of Father de
Foucauld, or many religious in every Order; ask anySister who works with the poor, whatever the make
of her head-dress or the color of her veil. But also
ask that so many of the faithful of today, our un-
known saints of the lay apostolate or of the apos-
tolate to the workers. If the living God is a living
Love, a Christian cannot help but imitate this living
Love.
How far should our imitation go? No one can say
with certainty where that duty ends, nowadays espe-
cially when our neighbor can no longer be limited to
this or that poor soul whom we aid by almsgiving or
whose wounds we dress. For our parochial clergywho minister to the workers, the neighbor happensto be the entire laboring class, just as during the Nazi
persecutions it was the whole Jewish people.And today also our neighbor means those dark
skinned races, whom we have made our protegesand by methods that were not always gentle, to saythe very least. Yes, they are our nearest neighbor, if
we pretend at all to be worshippers of the God of
Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, who is also the God of
Ishmael. It takes many years to acquire the courage
no
THE LIVING GOD
to face so simple a truth. As a rule, we are well alongin years and almost ready to embark on our last
journey, before the scales fall from our eyes. Then at
last we see the sophistry and equivocation behindthe attempt to maintain a balance between the will
to power of a nation, the financial interests of a few
men, and the command given us from the beginningto proclaim the Lord to every people and to baptizethem in the name of the Father, the Son and the
Holy Ghost.
But have no fear, I am not unmindful that I have
raised an extremely complex issue here. And, you can
be sure, I do not mean to decry whatever is fecund
and heroic in the accomplishments of France over-
seas. No, I do not intend to tread further on this
ground, which I have reason enough to know is a
sorely debated one. Yet how can one speak of the
living God without speaking of living idols? Wehave come a long way from the Baals and Astartes
that Israel worshipped on the heights to our ownAstartes and Baals. It is no longer a matter of statues,
whether of wood, ivory, or gold. The gods we fashion
are nobler, so noble indeed that there is no sacrifice
I mean human sacrifice which we would deemtoo great to make to them.
Many martyrs of the first centuries died for refus-
111
WORDS OF FAITH
ing to accept the cult of Caesar. But Caesar in our
day exacts infinitely more than a cult. In the coun-
tries we call totalitarian, he is not satisfied with
merely external homage. The gift he wants is that
of the whole person, the surrender of one's most
secret thoughts. The cult of the Roman Caesars at
least did not entail the denial of the Infinite Being;but we have learned how far the demands of the
bloody idols of State and Party can go today.
But here is the mystery: We denounce the idols of
peoples behind the iron curtain, but are blind to
those we worship ourselves. And what a strange ca-
pacity for deifying things the men of our country
have, even when they are Christians! Actually, what
have we not deified, all of us without exception?
Money, of course, first of all, science and technology,the social order, the party, the working class, a par-ticular philosophy, a theological system. . . . Thesewe have placed above all question, all criticism, andall judgment
It is not easy for us to detect this idolatrous ele-
ment within us, we are so seldom conscious of it.
Christians who give way to passions of the heart have
no trouble agreeing that the love of a creature is
enough to obscure God for them. And this is still
more clearly understood by individuals whose lives
ris
THE LIVING GOD
have been brutally simplified by a dominant vice.
But it is much harder for us to conceive how a politi-
cal, an ideological, or an esthetical passion can
separate us from the living God.
"Dear children, guard yourselves from idols/' For
a long time this last verse o the first Epistle o St.
John seemed to hold little significance for us
moderns, since it applied to the first Christians in
open combat with naked paganism. "Dear children,
guard yourselves from idols." Today we realize that
we are the little children who must be guarded fromidols. It was to us across the centuries that this pleawas addressed, to us who walk through a forest of
idols. A forest of idols separates us from the livingGod.
Have we ever got through to this God? Is there any
hope of doing so? We realize how utterly presumptu-ous it would be on our part to answer yes we whoknow the price the saints had to pay to possess the
living God we who perhaps have not taken a single
step along the route followed by a John of the Cross.
Still, as you know, there are humbler paths alongwhich so many poor women, so many mothers of
families have advanced toward God without realiz-
ing it.
Occasionally at morning Mass, we notice a house-
113
WORDS OF FAITH
wife, with a worn countenance, who slips furtively
into her pew. We hear the rattling of her grocery bag
as she puts it on the seat, and then we watch her
enter into peace. No doubt we would spend our time
better if instead of watching others pray we prayed
ourselves. Yet this distraction, if it really is one, helps
us to realize that these things are possibly simpler
than we imagined. "Be ye perfect as your heavenly
Father is perfect/' This command was not given to
a few, it applies to all of us. There is a kind of per-
fection that is within our reach, within the reach of
anyone who loves God. Yes, within the reach of
plain and simple people, though perhaps not of us,
the intellectuals, as we describe ourselves on the
notices of this Convention not without some pride.
Well, as the poor housewife lays aside her bag of
groceries and bottle of milk, let us put aside our little
bundle of ready-made ideas and parrotted systems,
and let us open our souls to that love whose witnesses
we are in the world. A Catholic intellectual, being a
writer and a speaker, is essentially that, a witness.
And this is our only excuse, it seems to me, for claim-
ing to have something to teach others, and to have
the right to speak and be listened to while others
hold their peace.
testimony that is asked of us is not simply
114
THE LIVING GOD
a matter of crying, "Lord, Lord!" in the public
square. Everj[. igestuirje. we intake, on every occasion,
should testify thatjve are striying to judge humanconflict in the light of the God of truth; you under-
stand, of course, that by human conflict I refer to
political conflict. Alas, all is clear and simple as longas it is a question of the drama within us, of this
poor heart of ours whose twisting and turning,whose wretchedness we know so well. There is
scarcely a problem of conscience affecting our per-sonal life that will not give in to a few moments of
meditation and prayer. But nothing is clear, nothingis simple when we turn to the problems evoked byhistory in this sad world or by our conduct as citizens.
Since politics are essentially impure, it arouses us to
passions which, if not always base, often proceedfrom the spirit of anger.How difficult it is for a writer engaged in political
affairs to know what the Father expects of him, and
the Son, who is meek and humble of heart, and the
Holy Virgin, who weeps in front of children and
speaks only to young Bernadette! And yet, it was this
same Jesus so meek and humble of heart who rent
the air with the whip intended for the unworthy
money-changers. And it was the maledictions which
he heaped upon the Pharisees that aroused their first
115
WORDS OF FAITH
desire to kill Him in their hearts. And Mary, too, the
young maid of Nazareth, exulting at what was being
accomplished in her, exclaimed, and will always ex-
claim in the voices of all the generations which con-
tinue to intone her Magnificat: "He hath shown
might in His arm; He hath scattered the proud in
the conceit of their heart. He hath put down the
mighty from their seat and hath exalted the humble.
He hath filled the hungry with good things and the
rich He hath sent empty away/' This is much
stronger than anything I would dare to write in an
editorial.^
You understand, I trust, what my purpose is in
quoting these sublime verses, and that it is not to
distort their eternal meaning. But do not hope to
find justification in the life of Our Lord or of the
Holy Virgin and the saints for your own indifference
to the world, and its visible history.wFor the witness
of the living God there can be no question about
being committed; he cannot help but be a man of
action though there are as many types of action as
there are individual vocations^ One thing is certain:
the Catholic intellectual is called to bear witness
both in season and out of season.
Since the intellectual is also a man with passions,* Mr. Mauriac is literary editor of the French daily, Le Figaro.
THE LIVING GOD
however, and sometimes holds intense political
preferences, he must never lose sight of what Goddemands of him: that his testimony remain pure.
Yes, we ought to hunger and thirst for justice, to be
sure, but not hunger and thirst for vengeance. Tosuffer persecution for justice sake, yes, but not to
persecute in the name of justice. The pleasure of
besting an opponent, of dominating, of being the
stronger; irritation, anger, scorn, if not the hatred,
all these, the witness of the living God mustthwart and control within himself, if he does not
wish merely to serve, in the name of God whom he
claims to love, an ideology made into his idol.
You will wonder, no doubt, whether it is possiblein the heat of the battle of ideas, which, unfor-
tunately, is also and above all a battle of humaninterests, to behave like angels. It was the secret of
the saints to act invisibly and powerfully on their
environment without a loss of saintliness. But their
secret is within our grasp and can be expressed in
one brief sentence: contemplation purifies action.
Our generation understands this, in my opinion,better than the ones preceding us. Christian sanctity
no longer sets up Martha against Mary. The worka-
day life of a Little Brother or Sister of Jesus is, in
reality, a contemplative life. Among the Daughters
117
WORDS OF FAITH
of St. Vincent de Paul, among the Little Sisters of
the Poor or of the Assumption, how many there are
who never for an instant lose their sense of the
presence of God!
Contemplation purifies action. So why not politi-
cal action as well? Indeed, the experience we have
had with Christians in power for the last ten years
inspires thoughts you will allow me to keep to my-self; you must admit that in their case mysticismand politics have made strange bedfellows. But whoare we to cast the stone at them, knowing as we do
the paradoxes that plague a Christian involved in
public affairs? At any rate, believe me, the same
remedy that is valid for the saint is valid for us
journalists and writers. And I do not refer solely to
the saints on our calendars but to the housewife at
early Mass who places her groceries beside her each
morning and enters into peace with her Lord. The
remedy lies in the hidden life of the Father and the
Son abiding in those who love Them, according to
the promise made to us. It is within each one of us
that the true battle is waged. If we win it, the errors,
the setbacks, and even the grave faults of our publiclife will not prevent our rejoicing when the hourcomes for us to rest. For we shall have attained and
possessed, here on earth, the Kingdom of God andHis justice.
118
book
was
presented
to
the people
of Kansas City
as a gift
from. F. A. mi
OFEdited by
DAGOBERT D.
In tills comprehensive collection of
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not only the great thinkers of the West,but many of the important and less
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and the whole prodigious line of mod-
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to our days.Each entry begins with a biographi-
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events in the philosopher's life, list-
ing his major works, and Including a
concise, careful statement of his placeand importance in the history of phi-
losophy. This is followed by one or
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Much of the material contained in
this volume appears here in Englishtranslation for the first time.
$15.00
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